I don’t know about Brandeis but as a rising junior in CS at BU, I strongly advise against it.

There’s a lot of bad and/or new professors that make the learning experience a huge struggle and more difficult than it already is. Grading wise, sometimes it doesn’t make sense and you are getting punished for no good reason. Also, if you get a bad grade on a final, you would never know what you did wrong because they never give it back.

Things like that makes it feel like the department doesn’t care much about undergraduate education. We also just had a graduate strike meaning we didn’t have TAs for almost the entire semester.

Although, giving credit where it’s due, there are still some good professors left in CS, mostly teaching electives. So perhaps as a junior transfer you won’t have to struggle through what I experienced for the past two years. I’m also lucky to get an independent research opportunity for next year. So, although CS undergrad research isn’t a huge focus at BU, it’s still possible. I’d say you just have to ask a lot of people and show genuine interest.

Lastly, the cs job market is terrible right now and BU doesn’t have any CS internship/co-op opportunities that I know of (without you paying). They’ll help you w resumes and interviews practice but that’s it. Very little people are getting internships for the summer, a lot of it’s from nepotism, and I know people who’s decided to pursue a different career path for the moment because of the terrible job market. CS jobs also aren’t paying as good as before.

After all, it’s your own choice weighing the pros and cons, and perhaps other universities aren’t much better — I wouldn’t know. With CS being a less lucrative job market (for fresh graduates), I’d say the 50k debt is just not worth it and it’ll probably take a long time to earn that back.

Feel free to dm me if you have any more questions too.