I have applied to QuestBridge for the National College Match program, and now must rank 12 partner schools before I find out about my status as finalist. I have narrowed down my list to the following schools based on their distance from home in NY (didn’t want to be more than 3 hours away).
Vassar College
Columbia University
Wesleyan University
Yale University
Amherst College
Williams College
Princeton University
Brown University
Wellesley College
Boston College
Massachussetts Institute of Technology
University of Pennsylvania
Tufts University
Haverford College
Swarthmore College
If anyone could give me a ranking/reviews of these schools based on their computer science departments (other factors would be cool too), that would be of great help. The only ones I know I want to rank for sure are Vassar and Wesleyan. Thanks to anyone who helps in advance!
Based on what I know from CS people (my wife is CS faculty, so I’ve spent a lot of timr around them):
Massachussetts Institute of Technology (by a large margin)
Princeton University
Columbia University
Yale University
Brown University
University of Pennsylvania
(these are about the same)
Tufts University
Swarthmore College
The rest are more or less the same:
Williams College
Amherst College
Vassar College
Wesleyan University
Wellesley College
Boston College
Haverford College
In general, although Liberal Arts Colleges are amazing places, they are not strong in anything related to engineering, including CS. Swarthmore is good at CS for a LAC, but, while the rest will provide an amazing education overall, they do not have the CS offerings that large pubic universities have.
I would replace all of your LACs with the following QB partners: Stanford, Caltech, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, and USC. In fact, I would also replace Yale, Brown, and UPenn with any of these colleges as well.
These all have CS programs that are far better than any that the LACs on your list offer. The only LAC in your list which has a strong CS program would be Swarthmore.
A list of 12 colleges which are strong in CS would be start with MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, USC, Rice, Princeton, Columbia, and perhaps UChicago.
If attending the strongest CS program is your main interest, none of the LACs (except perhaps Swarthmore) have top programs. If attending a LAC is your primary interest, why would you apply to MIT and the Ivies that are on your list?
These are all T50 institutions and you would really need to apply different filters in order to come up with a ranking that makes sense for you. Right off the bat, you should decide whether you want a big department with a lot of sub-specialties or would you be willing settle for a basic course of study in return for a more intimate college community? Wesleyan and Vassar are in the latter category; MIT, Penn and Columbia would exemplify the former. You should be aware that at some smaller colleges, you may have to defer taking some upper-level courses until after you have declared a major. Whereas, at some of the larger research universities, computer science is tucked away in their engineering school which is a different experience entirely, especially during first-year. Anther filter that comes to mind: City versus Country (or mature suburb?)
@MWolf I should clear up that the list I curated are all the schools within 3 hours of me in New York, it is not based on my research into their programs and it just so happens most of them are LACs. The ones that are more towards the top of the Questbridge partner list such as Stanford are too distanced from my home right now for me to consider.
RPI?
Should you go to CA, Harvey Mudd comes to mind.
Re #4, note that the OP seeks an evaluation of the listed QuestBridge Partner schools. For the full list, see https://www.questbridge.org/college-partners.
In this case, take at least a bit of time, and try to figure out what you want from a college, aside from distance - @circuitrider makes good points.