<p>Hey, I'm a rising junior and just started looking at college. I feel like I would prefer a medium sized college with a close student-faculty interaction. So if you guys know of any colleges with around 5,000, give or take, please tell me. To give you an example of what I'm looking for, UChicago. I don't want to go to a school with 1500- kids where everyone knows everyone, and I don't want to go to a school where I'm going to be lost. And don't really take the academics into consideration, i just want a list of schools to work with. So something in the middle....</p>
<p>Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Dartmouth is more a National university than a Liberal Arts College....right?</p>
<p>Dartmouth is a university, but it is quite small and undergraduate focused. At least as much as Chicago, which the OP mentioned, probably more. I have heard many people describe Dartmouth as LAC-like, which I think is what the OP is aiming for, as most true LACs would probably be too small.</p>
<p>national university with an LAC atmosphere... around 3500 undergrads i believe. the OP mentioned Uchicago as an example. </p>
<p>Now about "big" LAC's... I don't think they exist at the 3000-5000 level. Williams and Wesleyan are probably considered big LAC's since most typical LACs have around 1500.</p>
<p>Some other small/medium universities that I can think of are princeton, rice, and tufts.</p>
<p>You're not going to find too many LACs in the ~5000 u/g range. Dartmouth technically is a research uni but its history and ambience puts it more in the small college tradition. If you compromise a bit on size, there are Wesleyan (2700), Colgate (2800), Vassar (2500), Oberlin (2900), not to mention any one of the Claremont Colleges in California; about 4,000 students from six different LACs share a campus roughly the size of Wesleyan's.</p>
<p>What about Colgate? Not as large as 5,000 enrollment --- it's just about 3,000 --- but that's not so small that you're going to know everyone you run into all the time. Campus is truly gorgeous and academics are very strong.</p>
<p>University of Rochester, Hopkins, Emory, Tufts, Brandeis, Ithaca College (6k undergrad and about 300 grad), SUNY-Geneseo, SUNY- New Paltz, Carnegie Mellon</p>
<p>I, too, was looking for the "big LAC," and that was an important part of my search. I ended up at Chicago :-)</p>
<p>Rice......</p>
<p>I second the Claremont suggestion. It's a consortium of 5 undergrad and 2 grad schools, totaling over 5000 undergrads and over 7000 total students. If you look at the schools individually, the largest is Pomona at 1500 and the smallest is Mudd at under 800. But the campuses are all adjacent and facilities are shared extensively (cross-registration, off-campus majors, shared sports teams, shared clubs and organizations, shared gyms and dining halls...it's hard to overemphasize the overlap). The result of this is that everyone gets the attention and focus of going to a tiny LAC, everyone has a niche within the larger whole, and there's still juuuust enough "facelessness" and variety going around to keep things interesting for 4 years (7 dining halls, 4 pools, and so forth). </p>
<p><a href="http://www.claremont.edu%5B/url%5D">www.claremont.edu</a></p>
<p>Try the public LACs, which are on average twice as big as the private ones. Here's a few of them:</p>
<p>SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Fredonia, The College of New Jersey, Mary Washington, Evergreen State, Ramapo, Minnesota-Morris, Truman State.</p>
<p>How about Santa Clara? It seems to be just the right size.</p>
<p>Holy Cross, Bucknell, Colgate. Holy Cross has good sports program and nice athletic facilities. Bucknell and Colgate are in rural areas while HC is one hour from Boston.</p>
<p>Thanks guys. I saw that you had questions about the "5,000" requirement; I wasn't aiming for exactly that. Instead, I am looking for something larger than a traditional, small LAC. Many of your suggestions are very good. And yes, I think I may consider Dartmouth, grades, etc. permitting.</p>
<p>Some highly ranked National Universities with moderate size include:</p>
<p>3049 Rice
4085 Dartmouth
4127 MIT
4332 Wake Forest
4478 J Hopkins
4760 Princeton
4807 U Chicago
4995 Tufts
5260 Columbia
5333 Yale
5669 Carnegie Mellon
5734 William & Mary
6010 Brown
6330 Duke
6378 Vanderbilt
6422 Stanford
6646 Emory
6715 Harvard
6853 Georgetown</p>
<p>Of these, schools mentioned often as being LAC-like include Rice, Dartmouth, Wake Forest and William & Mary.</p>
<p>Pomona. Definitely Pomona.</p>