The City University of New York New York City College of Technology

I was a former student of a 2-yr associates college and transferred to City Tech to gain a 4-yr degree in Computer Systems. Unfortunately, a lot of my credits were deemed unacceptable and I was forced to start all over again or pay my way into a very expensive 4-yr private college to slide in. I chose the economic path and stuck with it. I ultimately graduated with 4-yr degree in CS, but all the assurances and teachings of the school never bore fruit and I'm working at a low-wage job to make ends meet.

Good:

The only thing nice about the school is the social life. You'll make many friends and meet a lot of interesting people along the way, but most of them are like us, just working hard to find a new path in life. Weekly, you can get a free back massage, a free gym, public social functions. The only successful program they actually got is the culinary, ironic for self-titled technical school that's better in the arts than tech.

Bad:

The summary is that the CS program is a failure. While their professors are talented, a lot of them can't teach. Approximately 5 professors are the best in the CS dept, the others are just terrible. Their program itself doesn't reflect what's happening in the real world; your training doesn't mean much to anyone, especially your hard-earned money. Equally, their internships are a joke. It doesn't reflect on your skills that they trained you for. They often find excuses and reasons to justify the poor internship experience, but really, they just failed to find the right companies to partner with and didn't even bother to make any sort of arrangements to ensure quality live training. Not one teacher bothered to tell me about the certification exams either. I only knew about it because my past school gave you automatic high scores if you passed the certificate related to the course. Sadly, there's no reward system either. Overall, just don't attend.

Advice:

It's better for you to train at a trade school like NYBI. At least there, you can actually develop your abilities and career in a short span of a year vs 4-5 yrs. Naturally, a degree will get you places into the public sector, but private sector could care less; they only care about what you're good at and proof through your technical certificates (Comptia A+, MCITP, etc).