ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education
SIGITE

IT Undergraduate Programs (USA)

Thanks to the SIGITE-funded research of Barry M. Lunt, Brady Redfearn, Elizabeth Mitchell, Samuel Tenney, and Cayman Williams (all from Brigham Young University), we can provide a preliminary list of Information Technology (IT) bachelor’s programs in the United States. The list contains 220 universities with IT-like undergraduate programs.

Due to widespread variation in the names of academic degree programs, one cannot simply count those named Information Technology. At SIGITE 2017, a framework was presented (see paper) for identifying IT programs and for evaluating their compliance to an accepted standard. This framework has been applied throughout this research. They first compiled a list of prospective IT programs to research. Each university on the list was researched by looking at their university webpage in search of a list of computing majors listed at that university. If, at a glance, these program’s required courses look similar to those required in an IT program, the program was evaluated and given a numerical score compliance factor, as compared to the standard, no matter the name of the major. This compliance factor was calculated using the assessment form that is included in their SIGITE paper (the larger the number the more compliant the program to the IT Model Curricula). The results of their analysis are presented below. View their data as Excel files:

Note: The compliance score shown here is not meant to indicate that one program is better or weaker than another. Rather it is the score calculated by the authors in the above study to show a program’s relative compliance to the official ACM IT curricula.