I'm supposed to read deeper and guess your career ambitions???
my post was just pointing out that there are many many ways that "IT" can be interpreted. Your question asked for a specific answer to a non-specific question. that's why the suggestions are a bit all over the place.
I wasn't rude, I asked you to clarify your question. what you mean is if someone points out that you weren't clear then you'll be rude to them?
anyway... moving on...
My first, (and most sarcastic) suggestion is, get a decent grasp of language and how to explain things better, when you're being either a sys admin or a software engineer you're going to need to tell people how they should use the systems that you're implementing, and write documentation. doing a bad job of explaining yourself then telling people to read deeper when they question you isn't going to work in the real world.
This isn't something that necessarily will be taught on any course but it is something you'll need to learn if you want to get anywhere in any job. in fact it's something that you'll need to learn to properly write your applications to colleges.
Secondly, there is an education path to software engineer, it obviously involves studying software development at college, learning about paradigms etc.
you can look at undergraduate prospectus for courses and know what modules of learning you'll be doing, I would expect that at any place if you're studying computer science you will do a rounded course in the first year, that would cover some programming etc, and some MIS stuff, information about networking etc. through the later years you'll get more and more specialist knowledge, your courses will gear you towards a particular path.
And certain institutions will be better at it than others, (for example the university that I attended had various links with Oracle, and offered very specific and tailored learning towards this, it may be that a different institution will have very specific and tailored courses that would cover MSSQL, others may not have any affiliation with either of these big vendors and might do all DB work against Access, or MySQL (this is more likely in smaller less funded institutions).
There is no defined educational path to working in computer support.
a sys admin is a support position, it doesn't matter if they work for a managed services company doing outsourced support, or are internal systems admin. There are no this is how you provide support courses...
My impression of MIS systems courses is that they are very focused towards telling you how MIS software should work. but you should be able to get that same information from the Masters in Computer science. (so they deal with how information should flow in systems, and how to manage information.) clearly you need a grounding in this when you're being told how to write software!
(Can I assume that the education system where you are is similar to where I am, where you would study for a bachelors degree first, and then further study for a masters after having gotten your bachelors?)
Anyway, it seems that you're not 100% on what you want to be, and not 100% on what course you want to do, I'm a little confused as to how you have chosen two institutions already.
get a clearer idea of what you want to do first, then pick the institution with the sylabus that seems to offer the best path to get there.
(this goes back to saying if an institution can tell you all about CISCO systems, is partnered with or whatever) they should be preferred over an institution without this industry link, if a course says that you'll be programming in Java, this should be preferred over an institution that says they are going to teach you to program in VB script.
yes, VB script is a great tool for creating login scripts, but you're getting a better introduction for the other technology.
Lastly, study to the highest level that you can manage, put up with or afford.
that software job may have needed the masters, and there may be jobs that don't.
there is little point in going for the low hanging fruit and just getting the minimum to apply for a handful of jobs if it means that you're cut off from a load of other jobs!
