Who owns the intellectual property rights to games that are created by students?
What to look for: Ideally, the students should own all copyright and other intellectual property ownership of the projects they create while they are students. What to do: Decide if this matters to you. Some people don’t care, because they aren’t planning on selling anything they make as a student anyway. Some people care, but they’re willing to compromise on this (maybe by just not using their favorite game ideas until after they graduate) in order to go to a school that is otherwise their choice. For some people, this is a deal-killer. What to watch out for: Some schools explicitly state that they own all rights to all student work. Probably the most notorious example of this was Team Toblo (a good story to read for why IP ownership might matter to you as a student). Other schools do not have an official policy at all, which is a signal that they haven’t thought about it yet in spite of it being a legal and public relations minefield. In these cases, proceed with caution, because the
