Computer Science is of the hottest master's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #17 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 30 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Computer Science Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 3,982 master's degrees in computer science during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Computer Science School for Your Master's Degree
The compsci master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on computer science students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of computer science students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt computer science students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized computer science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for computer science students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Computer Science Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in computer science needs to take a look at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the city of Champaign.
Computer Science master's degree recipients from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earn a boost of about $35,952 above the typical earnings of computer science graduates.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
The compsci master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
