Is it worth private school for interaction, UI/UX design, Human Computer Interaction?

College Search & Lists
1

Im community college student GPA 3.4 looking to transfer since I’ll be finishing soon. Im also from the NYC area and I’ve been researching schools for interaction or UI/UX design and I can’t seem to find any undergrad schools with these programs. I found New Jersey Institute of Technology in newark which has the BS in HCI though the school’s repuation sounds as if Its better to go elsewhere, however the tuition is less than 20k.

Their are also CUNY schools which offer web design such as City College of New York and City Tech but no emphasis on the UX user experience side. Ive also came across Cornell which has a concentration in UX in Information Sciences but I don’t know if my application will be up to par considering my sat scores from high school of 1050 which is horrible! Im not a very academically inclined person more so in math. This has led to consider taking the ACT in hopes of a better score.

I was also considering applying to far schools in west coast like art center (pasadena) and CalArts but I’ll be in over 60k in debt. My issue is given that I get such little financial aid of $250 because of parent I’ve been paying out of pocket and will finish CC with zero debt. I have older sibling who attended private uni and is also in debt. So in a way I feel as if I don’t want to burden this debt even more. Anyhow, my point is I wanted to know if its really worth going to these for profit colleges given the program is hard to find and are located farther away or apply to New Jersey Tech school?

2

NJIT is a fine school for what you want. In UI/UX/HCI, credentials won’t be incredibly important, but your skill set will be. Go where you can develop it fully for the cheapest. Given how new the field is and how few programs are offered, I think NJIT is a very solid option if you can afford the tuition.

3

Some of the NYS CCs have formal articulation agreements with Hum Ec https://www.human.cornell.edu/admissions/transfer/articulationagreements Is yours on that list? If it isn’t, talk with the Transfer Advisor at your CC, and with Transfer Admissions at Hum Ec, and get advice specific to your situation. You don’t have to figure it out all on your own.

You do not want to be 60k in debt. Keeping your debt under the federal loan maximum is your best plan. Since you haven’t taken any loans yet, if you want to, you can borrow the sophomore amount ($6,500) this year and stick it in the bank to help pay for the rest of your studies later on.

4

There’s nothing wrong with NJIT.

5

Thanks for the replies.

So I called NJIT and to my misunderstanding, having resided in NJ for more than 12 months but not actually living there I don’t qualify for in-state tuition. Which the out of state tuition would be 36k a year. Which is close to a for profit art college in NY I’ll have to narrow down my choices.

Has anyone heard of General Assembly? would it be worth attending classes there for competition of UX design program rather than going to a Uni?

6

Do not go to a for-profit school. Your diploma will not be worth the paper it’s printed on.

Where are you in-state, NY?

7

A computer science degree from a CUNY school is possibly the most cost effective education available. Get yourself a job when you graduate and see if your employer might be inclined to pay for GA type training for specialization

8

I would bet that the vast majority of people currently working in UX do not have a specialized UX degree. They have some flavor of CS and develop their skillset in UX on the job. Or they have some other STEM type degree and developed programming skills on the side (my daughter the astrophysics major is a new Google software engineer). Certainly that was the case when I worked at IBM Research for many years (and worked on a lot of different user interface projects). I would look for a BS degree that is more practical than theoretical for your particular interests.

9

This is precisely why we need people with UI/UX education. Many companies suffer from having people without good knowledge of UI/UX and thus we end up with tons of interfaces that are absolutely horrid to use. Anyone who uses a computer regularly likely has a website or app that they can’t believe is organized visually as bad as it is. Making a UI us easy to do, but making an effective one for users is very hard to master and requires backgrounds in areas mostly not in CS.

10

That’s not really the point for this student. Should he spend $$$$ to go to a specialized school offering UX, or should he get a more general degree for an affordable price. The $$$$ is very unlikely to make him more employable, however much it might be nice if that were so for all of us using computers. I don’t think that most companies are beating the bushes for specialized UX folks to the point where the dollar difference for this particular student makes sense.

11

What state are you a resident of?
If you’re a NY resident, what about NYIT?
DO NOT go to a for-profit. The reason is right there in their name: they’re not in it to educate you but to make a profit off of you. Their degrees are worthless, employers consider you paid to get a diploma therefore didn’t earn or learn anything.

12

I reside within the New York City area. And astonishingly, for so many arts/liberal arts schools out here, only the school of visual arts (SVA) offers interaction design(UX) but as an MFA and not a bachelors. On that note, ruling out for profit schools because of $$$$ would leave me with these choices- NYC College of Technology in Brooklyn which seems to have a concentration in web design though more emphasis on coding, City College of NY’s Electronic Design and Multimedia bfa though its rather broad with print graphic design (not my intention given I have interest in UX/UI).

Regarding Computer Science I’m not necessarily trying to dig deep in coding. I’m not very academically inclined with maths physics and calculus. Already knowing html and css I’d want to enter UI/UX, interaction design field which seems perfect. Unfortunately as others mentioned it is a new field which maybe reasons why for profit schools would have resources to have them, such as Art Center, SCAD, CalArts to name a few. But if Im trying to save $$$$ I assume won’t be entering that wagon to pile on more debt considering another sibling who attended a for profit. So for the most part I’d like to focus on this area even though locally it might not be accessible for undergrad but for now until march the latest I’m still weighing my options as I haven’t applied to a single school to transfer for the fall.

13

I don’t think the goal of students should be “choose the most profitable degree”. What I am trying to say is that UI/UX and CS, despite their common grouping, are worlds apart in practice/skills. I can imagine many successful UI/UX people who would hate and/or flunk out of CS. At the very least web design would be a better fit.

Many tech companies do like having better UI/UX and are willing to pay, and I suspect this will rise over time. It’s simply that academics have not caught up. A career in UI/UX should be plenty lucrative. Consider Stripe, the payments company that more or less beat out previous companies through good design, technically, visually, and in interactions. Not all cases are as clear, but it’s far from the only company.

https://www.leejamesrobinson.com/blog/how-stripe-designs-beautiful-websites/

That only focuses on the visual aspect, but their design is present in interfaces as well as technical design done by people with CS degrees, which is a completely different type of design.

https://stripe.com/jobs/positions/designer
https://stripe.com/jobs/positions/communication-designer

In their job posting, they explicitly note the lack of degree requirement, focusing on skills, experience, and portfolio over it. For someone that knows this is the path they want, the types of art colleges mentioned can work well.

A more general degree at an affordable price can make sense. I just don’t think that path is CS, at least as a major. A graphic design major with a CS and psychology minor would be far closer. @Juvio21 , I would explore those types of alternative routes. Again, what will matter is your skills/experience, not what your degree says. Maximize those skills while minimizing the cost and you should be good. Best of luck!

14

SVA has the MFA. Look at their undergraduate course offerings. They might have related courses that fall into different majors. Check the specific prerequisites for the individual MFA classes. Are they restricted to MFA students, or can undergraduates in related programs enroll in some of them?

15

You don’t want an MFA though. And BFAs aren’t really ui/ux either.
Look into Cornell’s ux program (in CALS). Worth applying to even if it’s a major reach.
What about nyit? Dig into the concentrations in Ist for instance.
Look into Pratt (they have a 4_course certificate) but dont apply for a full degree since their financial aid is notoriously poor. I don’t know if they’re heop and if you’d qualify.
NYU Tandon has a ui/ux concentration. See if you can apply through heop. I you can commute from a relative’s apartment it might be doable.

All in all, look at the information technology school/program and dig into their concentrations.

16

Hi, I work in UX as a UX researcher!

You do not need an undergrad degree in UX to work in UX/UI design. Very few people in the field have a degree in UX precisely because so few schools offer this area, and most of the HCI programs are actually on the graduate level. If a school you like that’s also affordable has one, great. If not, you can create your own pseudo-program in this area: like double-majoring in computer science and psychology, trying to take all of the classes in user interface/experience that you can, and doing an internship in the area.

Information sciences and informatics are other good majors or areas to look into. So is cognitive science! But you definitely don’t need a fancy private art degree either. There aren’t a lot of roles for UX artists alone; you either need the coding/design skills or you need high-level research skills (master’s or PhD level).

If you’re from NYC, Stony Brook University has a human computer interaction specialization in their computer science department:

https://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/students/Undergraduate-Studies/HumanInteractionBS

The CUNY schools are also a great choice. City College is well known for its tech programs; Hunter, Brooklyn, Queens, and Lehman and City Tech are all also good choices. At any of these, you could double major in computer science & psychology, or major in one and minor in the other. Most of them also have media & communications departments where you could take some classes on digital/new media. In the psychology department, you’ll definitely want to take any classes in cognition, sensation and perception that you can (there are usually at least 2-3 of those offered). At most colleges you can also design your own major and you could design a user experience major, but as a transfer student coming in this may be difficult or impossible.

City Tech has communication design, which is related but not the same; it also has a BTech in emerging media technologies, which sounds like it’s similar/close to/related to UX but also not quite the same. However, these are both closely related enough that you could potentially break into UX from those majors too.

SUNY Oswego also has a cognitive science major.

If you’re going to go far and go in debt, then try to find a non-profit school that actually has what you want. Colorado State University has a great CS department that has a human-centered design concentration. the University of Utah has a multi-disciplinary design program (just listed under “design”) that is focused on human-centered design; we get student visitors from that program all the time. University of Washington has human-centered design and engineering, but that program will be harder to transfer into than the other two. Michigan State has experience architecture, which is pretty much exactly what you’re looking for. But it will also be difficult to transfer iinto.

Digipen is the only for-profit school I could say even think about; the graduates there tend to get jobs in the Seattle tech scene, but I wouldn’t recommend going deeply into debt when you have more inexpensive options at home with Stony Brook and the CUNYs (as I said, you don’t need an HCI degree to get into the field).

General Assembly is a decent choice for someone who already has a BA and is trying to change fields - like someone with a BA in English who wants to become a software developer. Don’t do it in place of a bachelor’s though.

But what’s really important is getting a summer internship in tech!

17

@juillet

Thanks for the advice!

I’ve looked into Stony Brook’s website for HCI and decided to rule it out. To have specialization in this area which I would have to major in BS of Computer Science. Their cirriculum seems very coding focused with required courses in calculus which is beyond me. I’ll be taking basic algebra then statistics to finish my AA next semester and summer in hopes of completing math requirements and be done with it.

I’ve also came across New York University’s (yes ridiculously expensive) program of IDM Integrated Digital Media which has sort of a combination of industrial/hands on design and technology. Its offered in their school of engineering. And their IMA Interactive Media Arts offered at their Tisch Arts school. Its also industrial/ hands on with technology but its more abstract and experimental. The IDM program says it has a core course in UX and I also have a keen interest in industrial design. Between the IDM and IMA I think it has an interesting balance between design and technology. But NYU is hella expensive, $40k a year. I think I’ll still apply to one of these programs in hopes of receiving a scholarship which I doubt.

City Tech has an articulation agreement with my community college which is good although their Communication Design program are focused between Graphic Design and Web Design. As I’ve mentioned Im not really into Graphic design per say and their Web Design is mostly coding and SEO classes. On that note, Im starting to feel as if Im picking favorites for NYU bc of their combination of industrial/tech even though I might not attend unless I get significant aid. And their career development resources have a lot of opportunities for internships and job seeking. Either way I’ll go on a whim and apply to most of the schools I’ve mentioned and see if time will tell for next few months.

18

If you’re not in calculus, you can’t apply to Tandon. :s Calculus is a class most kids in Tandon took in high school. So you really have to take it.
City Tech sounds like a good opportunity if they have an agreement with your CC!

19

There’s also a bunch of design degrees at FIT.

I personally think that UX/UI is closer to communication design than it is to CS.

20

It depends on the kind of UX or UI role. There are UX/UI development roles that are essentially software developers that develop with UX principles in mind, and those folks need computer science degrees or at least the equivalent experience and knowledge with coding and software development. Then there are UX/UI design roles that are looking more for artist/designer types with that sort of training. And there are some roles that want unicorns that can do a little or a lot of both.

It also depends on the program - there are some good HCI programs in CS or engineering departments that focus on the skills and knowledge that UX/UI designers, researchers, and developers need in one environment.

For someone who wants to be an artist/designer, a communication design program is probably a better fit for them than a CS program with an HCI emphasis. Buuuut I would still encourage that person to learn some basic coding skills and some basic statistical skills, since many UX/UI jobs prefer candidates who have those skills (particularly data visualization, for which you need both).