I chose UofT because that's the school I went to and I know it's in the Top 3 CS schools in Canada. I chose Stanford because that's the data I had on-hand and I know it's in the Top 3 CS schools in the US.

What I mean to say is: Compare the costs of attending the best Computer Science schools in Canada to the best Computer Science schools in the United States.

Or even compare international adjacent ranking schools. Here's a ranking list I found, you're welcome to find another: http://universityreport.net/world-university-rankings-2011-c...

It would make more sense to compare it to UC Berkeley which is tied for #1 in CS in the USA (and maybe the world?) It is about $10K a year if you're in state. Half of the 10 best CS schools in the USA are public universities and cost < $12K a year (in state.)

Fair point, thank you. I'm not familiar with tuition costs at UC Berkeley. At the same time, this points against the "College is expensive" mentality.

The college is expensive mentality is certainly real. "US-centric" just isn't an especially accurate characterization.

The mentality comes from a few places:

1. Discussion of US Private Universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, and Stanford, many of which have international reputations and attract students from all over the world, or the elite Liberal Arts teaching colleges like Williams, Amherst, Colby, Hamilton, and Colgate which attract the wealthiest Americans.

2. The real cost of college, in general, in terms of where the money goes (salaries, technology, infrastructure, etc.) rather than the sticker price, which may be subsidized.

3. People who rule out state schools for spurious reasons, as if failing to go to Stanford or CMU somehow means that you might as well not bother at all. (And many other reasons, high school kids are heavily marketed by universities and the kids often make the decisions themselves without thinking much about the finances.)

Perhaps it's a local bias, but U of T seems to be a fair bit... better... CS school than SUNY Binghamton.

(I'm a grad of another Ontario public university.)

I don't really know. I just picked it because I'm from New York and it was the first good school that popped into my head. You could compare with UC Berkeley instead, which costs about $10,000 to California residents and I hear has a pretty good CS program.

Yes, there are a lot of ridiculously expensive schools in the US, but not all schools are expensive and there are a lot of places where you can learn about computing fundamentals, algorithms, data structures, languages, operating systems, architecture, database theory and networks.

To be fair, Binghamton is cheaper than almost all state schools, and substantially cheaper than most if not all the Big10 schools.