So is the 10 Expensive Colleges Worth Every Penny ranking, which is why I’m surprised there isn’t more overlap. On the other hand, changing the schools sells more magazines and generates more site clicks.
^For whatever reasons, Forbes is publishing two different rankings with slightly different methodologies. The “25 Colleges With the Best ROI” version relies exclusively on Payscale:
http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/2012_Methodology.pdf
The “10 Expensive Colleges Worth Every Penny” version is an offshoot of “America’s Best Value Colleges” which uses a combination of Payscale and data from the federal government’s collegescorecard"
From Forbes:
Even if they aren’t as well known, is Williams as good as Princeton? Is Amherst as good as Yale? Is Middlebury as good as Harvard? This really matters to me because I don’t want to apply ED to a top liberal arts college if it is not as good as a top university. I really want to go to a good law school (Harvard, Yale or Stanford) so I can get a high paying job as a lawyer. I want to get a good, very prestigious undergrad education to prepare me for law school.
@circuitrider, Thank you. I missed the fact the that 10 Expensive Colleges used collegscorecard in its methodology. My point is that the rankings are useless for the many reasons Juillet mentioned and should never be taken into consideration when choosing a college.
You shouldn’t apply ED anywhere with this degree of sales resistance. Fortunately, the three universities you’ve mentioned don’t have ED. 
Those of you who have read this reflection before can skip past it, but the OP might find it interesting and apposite. When then candidate, now Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker was asked by The Boston Globe to take the Proust Questionnaire, he responded as follows:
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: Not going to Hamilton College. I never really felt comfortable at Harvard.
This too.
@VC25A2, I think the message is getting lost in the sauce - the answer is “yes, if you want to attend a top law school, a top 25 LAC will be a sure path to getting there” - a top university can get you there as well, it’s really about whether you want a big or smaller undergraduate experience.
^What chembiodad said. Agreed.
Yale and Harvard law schools post the undergraduate colleges that their current students attended.
Http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-scholl/undergraduate-college/?redir=1
http://bulletin.printer.yale.edu/htmlfiles/law/law-school-students.html
Click on “institutions represented.”
Many schools are represented, not all of which are highly ranked by US News; it’s the applicant, more than the school, who earns admission! But the top small liberal arts schools are very, very well represented on these lists.
A good friend attend a not particularly well-known state uni. She went there because that’s where her parents could afford to send her. Because she had the academic chops and was a person who enjoyed being involved in things, she absolutely loved her undergrad experience. She was in lots of clubs, president of several, stayed involved throughout college, made Dean’s List, etc… She attended Grad school at Columbia. The name of her college didn’t impress Columbia. She did.
The 20 Schools
Amherst
Brown
Claremont McKenna
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Georgetown
Hamilton
Harvard
Middlebury
Northwestern
Pomona
Stanford
UChicago
UMichigan
UPennsylvania
U of Southern California
Yale
Yeshiva
Source: College Transitions.
@VC25A2 said: "I really want to go to a good law school (Harvard, Yale or Stanford) so I can get a high paying job as a lawyer. I want to get a good, very prestigious undergrad education to prepare me for law school. "
@VC25A2 You aren’t listening to the posts offered here. Going to Harvard or Yale or Stanford is not going to get you into a good law school. Doing well as an undergraduate is going to get you into a good law school. You can do well as an undergraduate at Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Amherst or Bowdoin or Colby or UMass Amherst. You can also mess up and do badly at any of these universities and colleges.
No one is going to like you because of the university or college that you go to.
In your OP you mentioned that you would feel more comfortable at a smaller school such as Amherst, Bowdoin, or Colby. These are all very good schools. If you are comfortable there and if you can get accepted and if you can afford it then any of them would be very good choices. If you subsequently do very well at any of them then this will give you as good a chance as anyone at Harvard Law School or any other top law school.
LACs don’t really have much name recognition among the general public. Even the best LACs will probably be met with blank stares to the average American. I would not pick or leave out a school based on this though.
You should absolutely go to a university rather than an LAC, and absolutely the most prestigious one you get into (based solely on US News & WR). I say this because you will clearly die inside if you ever have the experience of having to tell someone where Williams is or how hard it is to get into Amherst. You will always feel inferior to alums of HYPSM, who will have the luxury of never having to prove themselves again after the age of 18. I’m not even being sarcastic (well, not totally). This is clearly an issue for you and there’s no reason you should carry the shame of a Swarthmore degree when you could ride your golden chariot through life with a Harvard sticker on the rear footboard.
As I read this, my question is “Who do you want to impress and why?” There are situations in which a person may be well-served by holding a degree from a top name school. (For example, many women in the 70s and 80s who worked on Wall Street, frustrated at being passed over for jobs they could do in their sleep, needed a top tier MBA to have a shot at promotions and better pay.) But I suspect it is not this type of specific situation that concerns you.
Do you not come across as smart? Think hard about what happens in the moment in your future when you disclose your alma mater. What happens next? How long does the effect linger? If your self-worth is linked to these moments, will you pick a job you don’t like because of prestige? A spouse?
All of these top schools, LACS to big research universities offer fantastic opportunities. Different from each other but not necessarily better. This will be for years of your life that you will do once. What do you want the experience to be? How will you best be launched for life?
Rather than splitting hairs over whether Dartmouth is better than Amherst, think hard about how you would be best served for 4 important years of your life.
@sheepskin00, understanding that your post is spilling over with sarcasm, luckily what you are hypothesizing isn’t corroborated by the attached data from admissions to either Harvard or Yale law schools - on per student ratio the top ranked LAC’s achieve similar results to the top ranked universities.
@WildestDream, agree that given the average American hasn’t attended much less graduated from any college, it’s unlikely they will know Amherst from Rice from MIT - maybe they’ll know UCLA because of its football team. That said I think most that have attended a top 100 college or university have at least heard of their peer schools.
When my son mentioned Williams, Amherst and Pomona to his high school classmates in March, NONE of them had ever heard about any of these schools and had to look them up in USNWR. That’s really unfortunate because these LACs not only hold their weight but arguably offer even better quality educational experience than the top national university counterparts. They also proved to be excellent feeder schools to top grad programs in the nation.
But the OP wants prestige more than anything else, and preferably with small class size. Assuming that the OP is aware of financial implications of applying ED, I can only think of Dartmouth and Princeton as the ones that have the overall smallest student body as well as small class size.
Well let’s ask the OP to provide us their academic profile and then we can provide some feedback regarding potential best fits.
And regarding the value of an LAC or LAC-like experience such as what Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton provide, I think the attached affirmation sums it up very well…
These college majors are the most robot-resistant http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/21/these-college-majors-are-the-most-robot-resistant.html
@TheGreyKing, and to further your point in post #27, the mix of LAC and elite university feeders to top medical schools is consistent there as well - those that argue that those attending LAC’s aren’t achieving the same results are simply denying the truth.
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-medical-school
And MBA feeder schools is also consistent - it all ties
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-mba-programs
@Chembiodad Is there really any point in trying to convince the OP that there are indeed LACs every bit as rigorous and prestigious as the top universities? If he (she?) is capable of admission to Williams, Amherst, or any other top LAC, then it’s quite likely he would be able to get into a similarly well-regarded university, perhaps even HYPSM. And if that’s the case, he should just go to that university and spare himself the status-anxiety that he’d have to fight against as a student at an LAC that lacks immediate name-recognition among the public at large. There’s no shortage of excellent applicants to the LACs, so losing one to the Unis isn’t a big deal.