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.
College Factual looked at 15 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Computer Science Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 2,044 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 the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Texas A&M University - College Station is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in computer science. Texas A&M College Station is a very large public university located in the midsize city of College Station.
Master's recipients from the computer science degree program at Texas A&M University - College Station get $13,364 more than the typical graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Arizona State University - Tempe is a good choice for individuals interested in a master's degree in computer science. Located in the city of Tempe, ASU - Tempe is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the compsci program make about $106,435 in the first couple years of their career.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
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.
