Brown U. has a comprehensive ranking of US/Canada CS programs which is based on a list of well-known ranking systems including US News, CSRankings, placement ranking, and others.
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These listings are of course always subjective, and one listing can vary from another. However, based on a quick look, this list looks pretty good to me.
This is really a graduate level ranking (of rankings). It may or may not cross over to undergraduate.
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It’s a very academic oriented ranking system. Most CS majors don’t go into academia and don’t aspire to go into academia.
I took a look and it seems reasonable.
As already stated, this meta-ranking appears oriented toward graduate programs in CS. Therefore, a reliance on it for the selection of an undergraduate college could be counterproductive.
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I agree. It’s hard to believe in undergraduate crossover if HMC isn’t even listed.
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Like any other list it has some shortcomings. I do like how you can select CS specialty areas and choose the underlying surveys.
They should be able to easily integrate different surveys that may cause HMC to appear. Not sure what those would be.
IMO undergrads benefit greatly from graduate program strength: more lab research opportunities, more/better TAs for advanced classes to name just a few.
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There’s always a tradeoff between more research, but being taught by TAs and less research and being taught by instructors with terminal degrees. Take Olin for example. They don’t even offer CS per se (it’s a combines EE program), but one of their main CS instructors is Allen Downey. He holds BS/MS from MIT and a PhD from Berkeley. He runs labs and discussions, not a graduate student. I’m not saying that one is better than the other as each have advantages. Quite a few good CS programs simply don’t show up though. That’s a problem if one is concerned about undergrad.
Having graduate level TAs to support professors is preferred to having undergrad TAs supporting professors
Most schools that don’t offer PhDs don’t have TAs at all.
Agree, and less options for profs. Grad school and grad students bring more dimension and opportunities all around. Just an opinion, I’m sure that undergrad only schools have much to offer as well just different. The more choices the more better 
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Grad schools bring more opportunities for undergrads? How’s that?
There is more cutting edge research at those institutions. If undergraduates can get involved, it’s useful if they choose a grad school path in the future. There’s usually a tradeoff of larger lectures and TAs running labs and discussions. What’s “better” is really a matter of personal perspective.
I think, at least from the experiences of our S, that the grad school was very much a plus. The biggest thing for him was the opportunity to get involved in research in one of the many labs. He got great experience and exposure, was published as a contributor on 3 papers, and got to attend a few conferences. He worked with PhD candidates that are now on faculty at universities in the US and Canada - he remains in contact with them today. I think that having grad students also makes it easier for the profs to manage classes (especially advanced classes) by helping with labs and discussions.
Basically, having a grad school, makes for a more robust academic environment.
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Would that mean then that Olin, HMC, Rose, Cal Poly, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Reed, and all of the military academies are less robust academic environments? 
The environments are certainly different. I wouldn’t say they are less robust.
There seems to be an orthodox viewpoint on the forums that TAs are necessarily bad.
But TAs are, for the most part, additional instructors, rather than the only instructor. So you might have at least two instructors for such a class, the faculty instructor and the TA (maybe three if the class also has a lab with another TA). Sometimes, having more instructors can help if one can explain something better for a given student than another. In addition, a student who goes to instructors’ office hours for assistance can have a choice between the faculty instructor and all of the TAs assigned to the class.
Some of the colleges which do not have PhD students and therefore not much of a pool to get TAs from hire lots of adjunct faculty to teach common courses (as opposed to specialty elective courses where a non-academic viewpoint is useful). To the extent that forum orthodoxy is unfavorable to this type of adjunct, be careful that you are not trading away TAs to get adjuncts.
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In terms of CS programs, I’m kind of comfortable in saying that having a graduate program is a definite plus and offers things that undergrad programs simply can not:
- Research opportunities working along side graduate students
- Opportunity to take graduate level classes as an undergrad
- Benefits of grad students supporting undergrad labs and discussion groups.
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I think we’re getting off track, but students can take graduate classes at schools that don’t offer PhDs. My son started that when he was a third year. As for grad students supporting undergrads in labs and discussions, is that better than former NASA employees with PhDs doing the same?
The only benefit in my mind is for students like your son that plan on pursuing graduate studies themselves. They have access to research that only happens in doctoral granting programs. That benefit is undeniable. The rest is rationalizing.
Back to rankings, which I will gladly bow out of, as an amalgamation of garbage, is still garbage.
Their “Placement Rank” is missing a LOT of data. I personally know at least half a dozen CS faculty from UIUC who are not on that list. The database is also messed up here and there. For example, they have a CS professor who is at UIC, whose doctorate is from Cornell, as a professor as a professor at Arizona State whose PhD is from UIC. Oh, and they have his undergraduate as being from Wisconsin, even though it’s from CMU.
However, the odd error is less of a problem than the missing data.
Most importantly, this is ranking done by faculty at a research university who seem to think that placement as faculty at a R1 is the crowning achievement of a CS PhD. Since the vast majority of people who do a PhD in CS are not interested in being CS faculty (around 65% go to industry), and of those who are in academia, the majority do not work at R1s, that tells me that they are out of touch with the majority of people in their field.
In fact, three of those measures are only important to academics, especially at R1, , who are, as I wrote, a minority of the people which PhDs in CS. Moreover, they ONLY consider placement if the graduate is working at a research university. Oh, except for W&M, since W&M is “prestigious”, even though it’s only an R2…
So faculty at research universities are ranking universities by how well they produce people like themselves. This is some serious self-absorption and self aggrandization.
As a way for students to decide which colleges to attend for their undergraduate, it’s absolutely useless.
As a place for students to decide where to do their PhDs, it’s also pretty useless, since it does not tell them any of the important things, like how well they support graduate students, financially, academically, and health-wise, departmental culture, etc. Worse, since, as I wrote, most PhD students want to go to industry, it does not tell grad students how well these universities will help them with getting the jobs these students want.
It’s a case of people living in a bubble creating rankings which measure how well a university manages to add people to the bubble, and considering those to be objective measurements of “quality”.
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