<p>i started my college search from a position very like the original poster's (i'm a HS senior) and since then have been making plane trips & phone calls around a ridiculous number of universities in order to answer more or less the same question. my experience has been that absolute rankings in classics are not very helpful when you're trying to find a program which fits you individually, and that even relatively high-ranked programs can be terrible for individual students. </p>
<p>for example, i visited cornell this october (12 nrc, 11 gourman) and went to a greek class, a latin class, and a (lecture) class in roman history. yes, they were small: i counted 5 students in greek and about 10 in latin. yes, the material was presented in a fairly engaging way. yes, the professors were well-regarded in their fields. but the classes themselves were at a standard well below what i expect from my (not elite) high school; students in these 300-level classes were making errors i would be surprised to see in an AP latin class. when i met with the DUS that day, he effectively told me that the school was a terrible fit for me.</p>
<p>let me emphasize that this was not either because i'm an intellectual snob or because, contrary to rankings, cornell has a poor classics department. it's because, in the words of the DUS, that particular undergrad program focuses on students who start greek and latin in college. moreover, even undergrads who start with more background have little choice but to stay in this program, because cornell's grad classes really are meant for grad students and as such have reading in secondary languages (french, german, italian). the DUS' advice to me was to seek the school with the largest combined (grad and undergrad) program. this kind of program serves highly prepared undergrads best, because it can offer both high-level courses that still have undergrad focus (i.e. don't require skills you didn't get in high school) and at least some grad courses that are realistic for undergrads. </p>
<p>naturally, i was irritated to hear all of this in october, after i thought i had already finalized my college list (based almost entirely on what i perceived as the quality of classics departments). i had decided that i was a big-prestigious-school kind of person; afterward, i became a big-prestigious-program kind of person. i applied to schools where i had had minimal interest before (michigan, columbia, chicago, tri-co) and struck schools which i loved as institutions but where the departments were just too small (cornell, stanford, penn). if i hadn't seen strength in classics as the driver of my college decisions, i would have stayed with the schools which were good for me in general but poor in my field. this might also become your situation.</p>
<p>the lesson here is that it pays to decide early what your academic needs are and how important it is to you that your college meet them as fully as possible. if you were a pre-med, you would make decisions based on school's premed-friendliness; if you think of yourself as a pre-doctoral student, it makes sense to choose based on classics programs. if not, don't make your college search beholden to something that's not critically important.</p>