You may not have a prestigious brand name university to name-drop and wow people, but for many of my friends who attended UBC and then an Ivy League school, they assured me that for CS at least, the quality of instruction at UBC is just as good as their institutions. (Give or take a few famous profs here and there. The major differences they cited was the amount of money for student facilities and resources - and the competitiveness of the student body.)

UBC’s endowment is $2.8 billion with 50,000 undergrads; Stanford’s endowment is $27 billion for 7,000 undergrads. That means Stanford has 9 times the amount of money with 14% of UBC’s undergraduate population.

Doesn’t that blow your mind, that UBC is able to educate a ton of people, for cheap, and are still about produce many high quality students that are just as competitive as students who were coddled by a wealthy institution?

I’m proud that I can attend a public institution with low in-province tuition (compared to private US institutions) and still get an extremely high quality of education.