Hi there,
I’m trying to decide between these two schools for Computer Science. I’m struggling to find good information online regarding the two programs. Anyone have any experience between the two colleges or their CS programs? Thank you very much!
I’m not entirely sure about University of Arizona, but I do know that Arizona State has a particularly good computer science program. In fact, of all their programs, it is one of their better one. My best guess is that it is better than U of A’s program.
It certainly seems more promising, but I reside in Tucson so I was hoping someone could persuade me in the other direction 
Both U of A and ASU have reasonably good CS programs. US News says U of A is ranked 40th and ASU is 48th, but I’m not sure whether small differences in ranking programs ranked below 30 actually mean much. Also, these rankings are purely based on reputation, and not directly on research performance or undergraduate quality. I’d say you’d be fine with either school. The research-oriented rankings http://csrankings.org/ place ASU well above Arizona.
Based solely on CS quality, I’d go with ASU over Arizona.
Thanks for the response, that’s a really nice website you found there.
I didn’t trust the US News ranking since I believe they only ranked the graduate programs. ASU is certainly in the lead though.
In CS particularly, there isn’t a huge difference between “undergraduate rankings” and “graduate rankings”. The same professors teach the undergrad and grad classes and the graduate students are TAs for undergrads. So a strong graduate program means more driven faculty and graduate students/TAs. US news is suspicious because they only look at reputation as determined from a survey. CS departments have been hiring like crazy recently, and the reputation is often a strongly lagging indicator of quality.
A caveat is that some schools like the Ivies allocate disproportionately more resources on undergraduates and the undergrad culture and student quality at various
If it’s much more convenient for me to attend Arizona instead of ASU, do you think it’d be a bad decision to do that? I can’t tell if the program is so much better that it’d hurt me to attend Arizona. (I’d be trying to get into a good grad school)
They are both in the same tier and aren’t perceived very differently. How you take advantage of the opportunities at the school you attend matters much more than the differences between these two CS programs. At the graduate level, they probably have different strengths (i.e. Arizona is strong in a different area than ASU). At the undergraduate level, they’re perceived almost exactly the same. I work at a large software company and know graduates from both schools.
It’s not like WA where UW-Seattle is the best in the area by far.
At least here in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area, I’d think most employers will view the two schools as pretty similar. Going to UA would be perfectly fine.