What is Cleveland State University like?
Hey guys, I am an international student from India. I am considering Cleveland State University for my masters in Information Systems. How is the University like? Is the education good. I am worried because the most of the reviews on google maps and google are bad. How is student life at CSU and Cleveland in general. The positives and negatives of the university and city, best places to live/rent at, things to do for fun, and placements after graduation etc. Please comment any insight you know. I appreciate any help with this.
CSU gets a lot of hate, but I actually really enjoyed my time there. I had some wonderful professors and was fortunate enough to land a great job after graduation. Not much in the way of campus culture, but they do have a sizable foreign student population. It’s very affordable for a public university.
I got my undergrad there and now I’m working on my graduate degree, still at CSU. I really like it. I do agree with some other posters that on campus life is a little lacking, but since the COVID pandemic has kind of slowed, they have introduced a lot more events and programs on campus. There are also lots of sport, academic, political, and social clubs on campus. CSU also has a pretty large international student population who often have clubs and events themselves.
As far as quality of education goes… it depends. The Urban Studies school is actually one of the best in the country and I’ve heard good things about the engineering college. As far as some of the liberal arts degrees (which was my undergraduate degree) I think you get a decent value for money and at the end of the day, a lot of jobs that want you to have a degree, just want to see that you got the diploma at the end, not really the “quality” of the school you got it from. Internships and extracurriculars are probably more important than the classes in some ways.
TLDR: I liked it for the purposing of getting a degree and meeting a couple new people for a reasonable price (not sure what tuition and stuff looks like for international students unfortunately)
Hope this helps in your choice!
As an actual student, I’m really enjoying my graduate experience so far. I feel challenged but not overly burdened by my coursework, my professors are knowledgeable and have meaningful connections in their field and are generous with their knowledge and expertise (one of my professors gave us multiple resources to access our textbook for free), the people who work on campus really care about helping you when you need support (in my experience) and it’s far more affordable than my undergraduate degree at another nearby university (cough CWRU). I can’t speak for the international experience at CSU specifically because I’m a domestic student but my partner is from abroad and we’ve been through a good portion of the immigration process and Cleveland is one of the best cities in the country to immigrate to as far as resources and USCIS processing time goes.
Solid State university but definitely more of a commuter school. They are working to change that by offering more student housing around campus. The city is sort of your campus, but CSU also has expansion plans in the works.
If I were a student, I’d look at housing near campus or in places where you’d be near the rapid line.