Hello, I am a high school senior stuck between UIC and DePaul for a Computer Science major. I visited and liked DePaul’s campus and liked its quarter system and smaller class size but the big thing holding me back is the cost, I’d still have to pay over 12k a year. I’ve yet to visit the UIC part of campus for CS, but thanks to scholarships I would essentially have tuition waived if I went there, and I’ve heard good things about its CS program, too. Ultimately, I want to make my decision around cost and how good it is for my major, and maybe even a good social life if that’s possible.
I went to DePaul for law school, my parents attended and met at UIC, and my Dad worked at UIC for nearly 3 decades, so I’m very familiar with both of those schools.
UIC is the higher-ranked computer science program outright (which isn’t surprising since UIC is a fairly strong STEM research institution), so the fact that it would also be significantly cheaper than DePaul means that UIC would be a no-brainer on a pure academic basis. I do understand liking DePaul’s campus better (as I loved both the Lincoln Park and South Loop campus locations, too) and it’s a bit more social compared to UIC, but that’s definitely not enough to compensate for paying significantly more and having a lower ranked program for what you want to major in. They’re both ultimately urban schools with a mix of residential and commuter students. With the atmospheres generally comparable, I would advise my own kid to choose UIC in this scenario with the cheaper cost and higher ranked program.
Thank you so much for your response and your insight! I’ll highly value your answer when I make my choice.
I don’t think you should use ranking as a criteria. Neither school is ranked all that high. If you were worried about ranking, you should consider UIUC or NW or Purdue or UW.
What I would look at is what are your major options and job placement rates. DePaul’s College of Computing is the biggest in the nation with almost 3,000 people in it, in 16 different majors. It has a national reputation for certain majors like game programming, and they have a very solid connection with a lot of industry in Chicago. I speak with somewhat of a bias as I am a CS grad from DePaul and I know the CoC Dean very well and I know he puts a lot of emphasis on keeping up with latest in computing trends.
Also, I don’t think $12K a year is that big of a difference if one school feels a lot better than the other. If it was > $20K/year I might lean more towards the cheaper option.
By almost all criteria, UIC is a better choice for CS. They are part of a college of engineering, with all the rigor that this implies. UIC is an R1 and the CS department likes engaging undergraduates in research. They have EVL, which is a world leader in visualization. They’re very good at providing resources for internships (go online and look their resources for internships, as well as the list of companies which recruit interns from UIC). While their classes are larger, almost all of their faculty are full time (mostly tenured or tenure tack but also Teaching faculty on multi-year contracts).
One of the good things about UIC is that the opportunities for internships are fairly extensive. When looking at colleges in any tech field, the top thing to check should be the the resources that a college, and a department provides for students who wish to do internships. This is critical because the most important factor in deciding whether you will get a good job out of college is whether you had an internship. The more internships you have, the higher your chances are of getting a job right out of college. UIC’s CS department is pretty good at that, and this is evident from perusing their website.
Rankings are not what is important, as much as recognition in the field. In the tech world, UIC has a good deal of name recognition.
For full disclosure - my wife is faculty at UIC’s CS department, so I will be biased. However, I also am very familiar with what the department has to offer to undergraduates.
In all honesty, though, UIC has a seriously ugly campus (which idiot thought that American Brutalism was a good look for anything, much less a university?).