Colleges that are great a teaching physics

She may want to check out Union College in Schenectady, NY. My son is a physics major there and we have been impressed. Liberal Arts school but a huge Science/Engineering program. One thing that stood out for him. There is a large number of FT Tenure Track Physics professors for a smaller program. The Engineering students take the early Physics classes - so the larger number of Physics staff. But the number of actual Physics students is smaller and they get great attention from the Physic Professors. My son has very personalized relationships with them, has access to great research opportunities as a Freshman.

Regarding @Peach94 - yes, I’ve heard great things about Union’s Physics Program. Union has a great undergraduate symposium, the Steinmetz Symposium. Instread of classes the students hear presentations about their classmates’ undergraduate research. They also have several good profs in their department.

It is true, as @intparent points out, that at research universities undergrads often “rarely interact with the lab professor (PI) when there are grad students in the mix.” I’ve heard that at many of these schools often/usually the research professor (PI) delegates the running of their research group to their Post Doctoral researchers, who in turn interact & manage the PhD and Masters students. There are exceptions to this of course, however at large research universities a professor gets rewarded by bringing in research grants and top publications, not for mentoring (and teaching) undergraduates. This is a different story at primarly undergraduate colleges, where a professor’s “rewards” are based primarily on teaching and mentoring undergraduate students, and research publications with these undergrads.

3 of our kids have all attended state flagships or state tech Us. They have had no problems joining research. Our dd just got funding for her project (so pd UG research). Our sons both worked directly with their profs. Both traveled with their profs to consortiums, presented, etc.

IOW, none of those stereotypes have been experienced by our kids. Our kids did interview depts and eliminated any school where UG research was not encouraged. (And there were definitely depts where that was the case.)

Thanks everybody- I really appreciate you all taking the time to give me your advice and information. I will look into your suggestions:)

OP says they’re not concerned with prestige or brand names. My D19 will be attending Hope College, one of the CTCL schools. Hope invited her to participate in an astrophysics summer research project this summer, before she even starts as a freshman, where she gets to spend a month at the Goddard Space Flight Center followed by a month on campus doing research (something about nonthermal emission from neutron stars), gets paid a stipend, and gets on campus summer housing that is close to free. https://blogs.hope.edu/stories-of-hope/tag/goddard-space-flight-center/

wow- that sounds great!

Case Western Reserve University has excellent undergraduate physics program, where every single student gets a research project, and also are coached to study for the GRE Physics Subject test, and also coached to apply for the Goldwater Scholarship, NSF Graduate scholarships in Physics, and also encouraged to apply for summer REU experiences in physics. Its pretty important to get some exposure to different fields of physics, as an undergraduate.
REUs can do that. Case Western is a perfect bridge because they do have physics graduate students and post docs, unlike Harvey Mudd, but they also really focus on undergraduates getting involved in these projects. Its very hard to run a physics lab without graduate students, so most liberal arts colleges, the professors may go to a different place over the summer to work (For instance, Williams College physics professors go with Willlams students to U of Maryland REU in Nonlinear Dynamics. ) students from any university, including Caltech, Williams or Case Western
can also apply to attend summer REU sessions around he USA.