.letmeinplz//

In that case you can check out csrankings and select the areas you are interested in and see where they stand compared to other departments (or if there are even professors there doing research in those areas).

Why would you apply if it wasn't worth the time and effort?

You should contact some current students in your program (I was passed several names to contact with any grad life questions I had once I accepted my offer) and see what their advice is, since they will know about your program better than any of us could guess.

Accredited by some regional accreditation agency.

Q1: Sure, but most programs reserve TA positions for PhD students who need it (since they are guaranteed funding). For RA funding that come from grants, usually the professor chooses who they want, so if you are doing research with a professor you might be able to snag an RA position. Q2: Most programs I've applied to (back when I was applying for MS) had some kind of path for MS -> PhD. My current program the path is "get recommended by your thesis committee for continuance", basically do well and you can change to PhD.

If WUSTL is 100% funded, then there. St. Louis isn't the best city but WUSTL is a great school.

What is even your goal? A terminal MEng degree and a research oriented degree probably have the same value (+2) in industry if you are just going to be a developer at Google, etc. If your plan is to continue on to a PhD, a more research oriented degree could help you get the research experience (and connections) admissions committees want (what I did to get into my new program). That said you can still do independent research with professors in terminal degrees too, they just don't usually require a thesis. But if your plan is to simply get a job, both will do fine (so take the money).

I think that it is a common situation for masters programs. Where I am getting my MS, TAship goes to PhD students who need it first. You can get a RA position but that decision comes from the professor with the funds to do so. It would be scary if you were in a PhD program, but a fellowship covering your tuition + some extra money is a pretty good deal.

Yeah I don't know, I've personally seen someone choose a school because it was an Ivy even though the other school eclipsed it (like top 1 school). I think people confuse undergrad prestige with graduate prestige. Though I'm not sure even that matters since companies are looking for specific skills (like CS, EE, etc) and so they are judging your university based on that, not some general undergrad metric of 'prestige'.

Look up the research they do and see if you are interested. You can look at sites like csrankings to rank those schools by top SWE publications and then click on each professor to take a peek at their work. Other than fit you should look at things like cost, living, etc but you haven't given any info on preferences.

If the school is part of the CGS res (with your deadline they probably are) backing out of an accepted offer after April 15th requires a written release. If your plan is to accept both and then tell funded choice you are leaving if you get external funding and telling unfunded school no if you don't get external funding, you will be burning bridges no matter what you do. Take the funded offer (they funded you because they want you).

I'm finishing up my MS CS at NCSU right now. Answered some of your concerns in red below.

Personally, never 3 (academic incest, expand your connections by moving on to other places). 1 seems like the best fit, if you are nervous about what seems like initial lack of interest remember that professors get really busy so they might have just had to put you on the back burner until they got through paper submissions or other deadlines. You will probably get more of their attention once you are producing research with them. Small cohort, most money, and least amount of coursework all sounds pretty good too.

Try checking out csrankings which ranks schools based on publications in top conferences, filtered by area. You can then look at each school to see a list of professors that are publishing so you can click them to go to their site and see if your interested in their work. Personally I would choose UCSD

QoP: Seems like Wisconsin wins here if you truly aren't interested in the 'hot topic'. Ment: Wisconsin seems to win but don't discount younger professors, they usually are very energetic in getting new and impactful projects done. Connections are nice, but it is possible someone putting out highly cited work is also forming those connections. Rest: Michigan seems to have a clear edge here (other than no first year fellowship and proximity to Detroit, but RA is good experience). I think taking your spouses QoL and career into account is important (I only applied to places where mine could get good work so no small college towns for me) and visiting AP/Fellow won't dampen their career goals as much as not being able to find anything close to what they want to do. You probably can't go wrong with the research experience and education you are going to get from both universities, so if you make your final decision on what is best for both of you, you might be happier with the result.