<p>Swarthmore is one of the most highly regarded liberal arts colleges in the country. If I were asked to name the liberal arts college with the most intellectual student body, Swarthmore is the first one that would come to mind.</p>
<p>When I went to Cornell a third of a century ago, ILR students claimed that ILR was an acronym for “I love reading”. It’s not a classic liberal arts curriculum, but its students seem to get a pretty good grounding in the social sciences. Many of its students attend law school afterwards; I had a roommate whose brother was an ILR graduate who went on to study law at Columbia after working for the air traffic controllers union. Most of its students take a significant number of classes at the College of Arts & Sciences.</p>
<p>I changed my mind twice my freshman year about what I wanted to major in. That would be less problematic at Swarthmore than at the ILR school. On the other hand, if you change your mind about law school (always a possibility), your job prospects (for a specific type of job) would likely be quite good coming from ILR.</p>
<p>Before you make up your mind, at a minimum, you should spend a lot of time looking at the catalogs for both schools. As a high school junior, I thought I wanted to study journalism at Northwestern, until I started reading the catalog and decided that the journalism courses sounded a lot less interesting to me than the courses in history, English, and political science. You might have a similar breakthrough.</p>