Just to reinforce the fact that Utah’s CS program isn’t some random off the beaten path program, the top 8 employers of their CS grads on LinkedIn are a who’s who of tech.
Microsoft
Google
Amazon
Adobe
AWS
Meta
Apple
NVIDIA
I don’t understand the pushback, especially in light of the substantial cost difference which the OP has said is meaningful to their family. If there was evidence that only people from the top names, a concept new since USNWR started “ranking” schools, got the elite positions, I might understand it, but there isn’t. It’s a mythology created from whole cloth, with no objective data to support it. Every alum from the big names who posts here routinely says they work with brilliant people who were educated at the most random places. Add to that, Utah is one of the few schools that actually has the subspecialty the OP wants and is ranked higher than MIT in that specialty, if you give any weight to that.
I agree, but I don’t think the BS in Games is a course that will challenge OP or allow him to best display his undoubted talents. The simple solution is to just take the EAE emphasis to a CS degree. He can take extra design/arts courses if he wants.
I’m pushing back at the upthread suggestions that Utah might be lacking. That notion Indirectly pushes the OP to programs that might create a financial burden, without any evidence that they’d be superior to The U for what the OP wants to study.
That was what I was planning on taking. I still get all the game design classes, but I graduate with a CS degree that is pretty versatile. From what I read of other schools, game designers usually take CS or computer graphics. I could not find many developers that took a game design major.