“I didn’t like the relative restriction of my choices at an elite LAC. They’re great if the student is more flexible about exactly what subjects they want to study, and with whom, and when. I’m not. Professor Y is on sabbatical this year, so there’s no one doing subfield Z. Course X is offered every third year, etc. When the Harvard course catalog, which was the size of War & Peace, came in the mail, I sat down and read it cover to cover. I still have it. I remember how happy I was holding all those possibilities in my hand. YMMV.”
This just hasn’t been our experience thus far. Granted, you’re not going to take an accounting class at Middlebury, and probably some other courses, but the idea that one would be intellectually limited in the highly selective LAC model is, to me, a stretch.
And, frankly Hanna, the picture you paint of the Sears Catalog of courses tells part of the story in, I would say, optimistic terms.
Bigger the school, bigger the scheduling hassle. You have priority registration and a bunch of other bureaucracy with which to contend. Sure, it’s going to be a bigger hassle at Penn State than at Penn, but even at Stanford I ran into some frustrations with course selection and availability. It’s not like you’re skipping around in an intellectual wonderland in which everyone is welcome to join whichever course they wish. Not my experience at all, and when it comes to resources and number of students, Stanford is up on the list.
My only real point, which I think is hard to dispute, is that at the LAC, the undergraduates are the show. Even at venerable Harvard, they are not. There is a lot going on there. It’s wonderful the things that are going on, but the focus is on many of those other things. Agree with @Ohiodad51 , not all Ivies are the same - Princeton and Dartmouth and probably Brown (I know less about Brown) seem to be more focused on undergraduates.