I expect E (undergrad research) will be the most important for my DS17. Whenever I’ve asked him what he wanted to do over the summer, research has been the answer, even when he was too young to get into any programs. I don’t expect that to change in college, so he’ll be looking at whatever the undergrad opportunities are in whatever field(s) he eventually narrows his interests to.
D (selection of majors and classes) will be second in importance to some extent, though a school without humanities majors would probably be fine with him. Personally, I switched from a STEM major to a humanities major, so it was good that my large state university had a wide variety of majors.
Like others, I’m not so sure about the A-C requirements. Some of my most interesting classes I had were classes taught by charismatic faculty in large classrooms. Some of the classes where I learned difficult material most effectively were taught by grad students. Some of the classes where I failed to learn difficult material were taught by tenured faculty in small classrooms. I can’t really assign a rule as to whether I preferred large vs. small classes and those taught by faculty vs. grad students.
F (low cost) would be nice, and the UC/Cal Poly schools are certainly lower cost for us than private options. But, that’s really a family issue that doesn’t affect the schooling.
I’m in CA, where we like to have A-G requirements, so I’ll have to suggest a G requirement:
G. Student is in the desired percentile of the overall university or major. I guess this is basically “fit”, and it explains why there isn’t really an ideal college for everyone.
“Desired percentile” varies for everyone I suppose. Malcolm Gladwell says you should be near the top. I’ve told my son (and he believes it from his own experience) that “If you are the smarted person in the room, you need to find another room.” Not sure who originally said that, but I think I read it first on the AoPS website. I guess we’ll aim for his scores being about 75th percentile, but we don’t have real scores yet.