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Comment by walterk | Hacker News Reader

Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?

- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.

- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.

- Class size.

- Affordability.

- Quality of environment.

No one criteria ever really "trumps" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas.

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Funny, in my opinion, the first four things you mention do not matter at all. Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends. If you can't learn from reading a book faster than you can learn from a professor, you're probably in the wrong field. But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.

> Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends.

This is probably reflective of your learning style more than anything else. While I've certainly learned more from the books (there's only so much you can cover in lecture and section), I've also benefited a great deal from instructors who could convey their passion and communicate clearly, and I'd wager this is true for more people than not.

> But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.

Only a few undergrads will actually generate a working relationship with a professor who's at the top of their field, and this depends heavily on what their priorities are. It's certainly not the default advice I would give to a college applicant.

I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation. What differentiation there is is due to the efforts of individual professors.

You don't even need to get accepted to any school at all to take some courses. They're free on the web. The differentiating factor is the instruction.

> I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation.

I disagree. Having been to Berkeley and Georgia Tech, I found that the latter's undergrad CS/CM program would have catered considerably more to my interests. For instance, if you're interested in creative/expressive computation, Georgia Tech and CMU vastly outrank other colleges, while Stanford has been notable for offering more "timely" courses like Facebook and iPhone development.

As I said, what differentiation there is is due to the initiative of instructors. I agree that this is an indicator, but it's still a somewhat indirect indicator. Often courses are also a reflection of what's popular at the time, or what might win brownie points for a particular professor or department.

If you want to find out what's really brewing in people's heads, it's better to just look up papers and talk to particular professors.

> As I said, what differentiation there is is due to the initiative of instructors.

This is clearly true. I just don't see why it merits devaluing an assessment of the courses. Quality of instruction clearly matters, and that's why I put professors immediately after. But if certain courses play to one's intrinsic motivations, this can be considerably more important to one's learning.

A great instructor teaching a subject you care little for can only do so much. But the opportunity to work on things that genuinely excite you can override having a poor instructor.

Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas?

One great thing about the World Wide Web is that these days most course syllabuses for many universities are posted on the Web, so that a prospective student can make head-to-head comparisons among the "same" math class at different universities.

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