If you pursue a master's degree in computer science, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #17 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 17 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Computer Science Master's Degree Schools in New York ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 1,817 master's degrees in computer science to qualified students.
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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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 full 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.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Computer Science Master's Degree Schools in New York list to help you make the college decision.
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It's difficult to beat Columbia University in the City of New York if you want to pursue a master's degree in computer science. Columbia is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of New York.
Those computer science students who get their master's degree from Columbia University in the City of New York make $33,081 more than the standard compsci grad.
It's difficult to beat Cornell University if you want to pursue a master's degree in computer science. Located in the small city of Ithaca, Cornell is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Computer Science master's degree recipients from Cornell University get an earnings boost of around $24,818 over the typical income of computer science majors.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in computer science has to look into Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Located in the city of Troy, RPI is a private not-for-profit school with a moderately-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the compsci program report average early career earnings of $125,338.
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
