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<p>Berkeley is one school where both a BA and a BS is offered for CS majors (BA for the L&S CS major and BS for the EECS major). The main difference in course and curriculum content is that the BA requires fewer physics, one fewer math course, and one fewer EE course; both majors select from the same CS courses (and have the same required lower division CS courses).</p>
<p>More generally, the degree title (BA or BS) is of no importance. What really matters is what courses in the CS major are required and offered, and how frequent the offerings are. Note that many smaller schools (including but not limited to LACs) have small CS departments that have few junior/senior level CS courses offered, and those which are offered are offered infrequently (like once every two years or less often). This is not true of all smaller schools, of course, but a student interested in majoring in CS should carefully check the CS department at each prospective school.</p>
<p>Note that ABET accreditation exists for CS. It is most common for engineering-based CS majors to have it (e.g. Berkeley EECS has it, but Berkeley L&S CS does not), since it has more science requirements that engineering-based CS majors tend to have but non-engineering-based CS majors do not. In general, ABET accreditation is not necessary in CS for either graduate school or industry work (other than if one is interested in taking the patent exam). It does set a minimum bar on the quality and offerings of the CS department, although some students will want to look for more than that.</p>
<p>The junior/senior level CS courses to look for in on-line catalogs and schedules:
- algorithms and complexity
- theory of computation, languages, and automata
- operating systems
- compilers
- databases
- networks
- security
- software engineering or project course or projects in other courses
- computer hardware courses (digital systems, computer architecture)
- electives of interest like graphics, artificial intelligence, etc.</p>