Picking a College

College is VERY expensive.   Too expensive to waste.  You go to college to improve your prospects of a good job after graduation, to learn something of value, and to graduate, actually get that degree.
   You want to avoid colleges like Mizzou, which made nationwide headlines after it's president resigned under pressure from black radicals.  No teaching or learning is gonna happen there, not for months, and a showing a Mizzou degree to an employer will get you laughed at now. 
   So how do you weed out the crazy places?  Well, first off, visit their website.  What activities do they take pride in?  Opening a new laboratory or running off a climate change demo?  Check the student groups on campus.  Chapters of things like the American Physical Association or IEEE are good signs, chapters of ACLU or SDS are bad signs.  Count the faculty, tenured professors and part timer "adjunct" professors.  Count the student body.  Divide students by faculty members to find the student faculty ratio.  Count the number of courses offered.  Sort the courses between real learning (English, physics, history, math, etc) and talky talky courses (gender studies, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies,art history, etc.).  Remember that professors of talky-talk courses are apt to egg students on to doing political demos with non negotiable demands. 
   Visit the campus and talk to students and faculty.  Get the students to talk about the faculty.  If the students are contemptuous of the faculty, that's a bad sign.  If the faculty are contemptuous of students, free market capitalism, American exceptionalism, and first amendment freedoms, that's a bad sign.  Read the posters on the bulletin boards.  Find some college blogs and read them when you get home. 
   You are looking for a place with a reasonable campus attitude, like we are all here to learn stuff, and we understand that as American college students we have it pretty good in life.  You want to avoid a place full of grievances, racism, class envy, and spite.   If everyone is mad at something or somebody, the place may blow up either while you are there, or after you graduate, reducing the value of your expensive degree.