^^ I disagree. IMHO, probably the MOST important factor is if the college offers the major the student is interested in. For example, Yale and Dartmouth offer a degree in theater studies, but Princeton does not. Next in importance is probably which school has the best fit – residential housing, campus location, friendliness of students etc. Then would come the attention of the faculty.
I agree. There are so many more variables that make an undergraduate experience great that go beyond the professors and access. Students spend very little of their overall experience in class or meeting with professors. It is the schools overall commitment to the whole undergraduate experience where Yale is far and away the best IMHO. Even if they have a brilliant professor, they must find something to do the other 12 -15 hours of their day - day in and day out. But from my perspective, I hope students and their parents find other schools appealing for whatever reason. Since Yale’s undergraduate population is under 6,000, the vast majority of other students have to go somewhere else, they might as well be happy.
I don’t know about science majors, but as a music major, my son who will be a junior next year, has already had three music classes where there were quite a few graduate students in his class. He didn’t feel like he received less attention from the professors than the graduate students in his class. From what he told me, he really enjoyed those classes.
What are people envisioning in terms of the attention that undergraduates receive from faculty? If it’s small classes, at least at Yale most students can have plenty of small classes. If it’s being able to engage directly with the professors, then they all have office hours, and it’s up to the student to go. Most don’t. If it’s whether you will interact with grad student TAs, this is a difference between the Ivies and LACs, but it’s a tradeoff–if you want to take a course from the superstar prof–like everybody else does–you will be in a large lecture, and you’ll have a section with a TA. The superstar prof will still have office hours–and most students will never go.
Like Hunt and TPerry, and like the undergraduates of today, when I was an undergraduate at Yale I certainly felt that undergraduates were central to the university, and that the faculty welcomed us and was interested in us. I don’t think Princeton or Dartmouth was any different, but not everyone at Harvard or Penn felt that way. (It didn’t mean they were unhappy with their undergraduate experience that they didn’t feel that way. Some were very happy, others not.) In my field, at the time, there was actually a fiddle that relieved some top professors from the obligation to teach undergraduates. Their appointments were to a department that didn’t exist in the College, and a few of them hadn’t taught undergraduates in years. Nevertheless, they were completely generous with their time and attention when I showed up in their offices (with an introduction from another professor), and while I was there they decided to start teaching undergraduates (and in very exciting ways).
Undergraduates and graduate students are never going to be on an equal footing. Graduate students are generally the moral equivalent of indentured servants (i.e., slaves) to a single professor . . . maybe in some cases two . . . for 3-4 years at a stretch, 60-70 hours per week, as their #1 priority. (And any other priorities, including sleep, sex, and food, start around #26.) After that, there’s another 3-4 years of close collaboration, followed by a lifetime of colleagueship. Senior professors’ reputations are maintained and enhanced by the quality of their former graduate students’ careers. So it’s a really intimate, long-term, critical relationship. Undergraduates are around for a course or two or three, and may work 10-15 hours/week, or full time for a summer, and they are expected (and tolerated) to have 50 other distractions all the time. Plus, the chances that they know something the professor doesn’t are nil, while with grad students it’s 100% after a year or two. There’s really no comparison.
The issue isn’t whether professors pay attention to undergraduates rather than grad students; it’s whether they make any space for undergraduates at all. At Yale, back then and I believe now, the culture strongly is that they do.
By the way, the grad students in a top department are hardly chopped liver themselves; many of them are the famous professors of the future, and they provide a great bridge between undergraduates who, effectively, are them minus a few years, and senior faculty who are much more removed from their teenaged selves, to say the least. For me, one of the key good points of Yale (or a similar university) was the relationships with graduate students, and the vibrancy they lend to the intellectual community in any particular field.
Well after spending a weekend at Yale I did what I said I wasn’t going to do, I fell in love with a school that’s next to impossible to get into 
thanks everyone for responding and on a side note, Yale is a much better environment than Harvard and I don’t see why any undergrad would choose Harvard over Yale. There I said it…
@brown1311917, it will be our little secret… I don’t disagree 
Good luck.
Last summer, after touring about eight colleges in the Northeast with her older brother and me, my eight-year old daughter picked Yale as her number one choice by far, purely based on the aesthetics of the campus of course. She was very unimpressed by Harvard.
@hzhao2004 My biggest issue with Harvard was the vibe I got from the students there. They came to Yale and did these fake tours where they misled visitors and I was highly offended by that. Being myself a low income student I understand that for a lot of families visiting is very expensive and some of the people they misled flew in from other countries.