The most appropriate advice in this thread is in post #39 @millie210 which urges OP & daughter to buy & read Fiske Guide To Colleges.
I told my D the recommendations regarding the Fiske Guide and hopefully, sheāll read itāthanks.
As of now, weāre not focused on the Kenyon/Oberlin/Grinnell/Denison/Macalester group due to geography/distance. You need to limit the choices somehow, or the process truly becomes overwhelming. Weāre not attuned to Richmond at the moment, but that may change at some point. I donāt know anything about it, to be honest. I guess thatās where the Fiske Guide could help.
@NEPatsGirl, I appreciate the input, I really do, but to me those sorts of concerns are premature. We recognize that we donāt have a final picture of what her application profile will look like yet, and wonāt for another nine or ten months. But since we canāt cram all of our thinking and campus visits into that singular two-month window, weāre doing the best we can now, while we have the time, fully understanding that further tweaking and narrowing of focus will occur as those other data points come in.
Iām not looking at rankings to the extent that I donāt care how the so-called experts order the schools on this list. I am looking at statisticsānot rankingsāto the extent of confirming that sheād get the best possible education and be most likely to be surrounded by the most kids like her. Are there smart kids at every school? Can you get a quality education anywhere? Of course. Iām not an idiot. Such a discussion, though, is beyond the scope of this thread, which, again, was to get opinions on the differences among the top LACs. Other issues you raise are more appropriate if this was posted in the āchance meā sub forum. Which it was not, for a reason.
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Adding another vote to one of @Homerdogās posts above, re: the book the Hidden Ivies has more detailed and nuanced write ups of many of the LACs on your Dās list as compared to Fiske or Princeton Review. Perhaps your library has a copy, as it is a little older, but still accurate IMO, and some subset of my family has recently visited many of these schools.
I would also encourage you to reach out to parents and/or students who attend these schools. By searching thru the threads in each schoolās section, it shouldnāt take too long to identify some parents and students. Many ccāers are incredibly honest with their feedback, especially when PMāing.
@RayManta I went through this process with my daughter a couple of years ago - life of the mind kind of kid, social justice bent but not over the top, ECs in performing arts, non partier, couldnāt care less about sports.
We needed merit aid so we centered our search on Midwestern schools. There are many excellent options outside of the NE corridor.
Itās unclear to me if your kid leans left or moderate. Keeping in mind that most LACs lean somewhat leftward, I would recommend the following:
If left-leaning, look at Macalester, Oberlin, Vassar; the first two offer merit.
If more moderate, maybe check out Carleton, St. Olaf, Grinnell, Kenyon, Denison; all but Carleton offer merit.
For matches/safeties, check out the Colleges that Change Lives schools (ctcl.org). You said that paying full freight for a mid-tier LAC would sting a bit. However, especially if your kidās SAT increases, itās likely that a significant merit discount on the order of 20-30K could happen at places like College of Wooster, Beloit, Earlham, Centre, Lawrence, or Clark, just to name a few.
Midwestern LACs that have strong records of grad school placement are Mac, Oberlin, Carleton, Kenyon, and Grinnell.
Finally, we were very impressed academically with Case Western and Wash U.
Iām following this thread with interest because we, too, have limited time and money for college visits. I think if you live in the NE, or even the mid-Atlantic, itās much easier to imagine visiting lots and lots of colleges. For those of us from farther-flung areas, itās really daunting, both in terms of time and money, and we look to CC to gather some personal insights, beyond just what the Fiske guide and the website can provide. Summer visits seem not worth it, as you miss the real student interaction, and many of us simply canāt travel during the school year.
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But OPās list has too few parameters. The Fiske Guide To Colleges can help one to make a more refined lists based on a particular studentās interests & needs. For example, OP lists both Wash & Lee and Vassar College as schools under consideration. Colgate & Wesleyan.
@Publisher I get it, but Iām in a similar place, and I find the Fiske Guide pretty formulaic and not in-depth enough to be useful beyond just learning what colleges exist. For most LACs, it goes something like this: Paragraph 1 is about the schoolās history, 2 tells how beautiful the campus is, and whether the rolling hills are bucolic or the buildings are architecturally significant, paragraph 3 talks about how itās just as competitive as the Ivies, paragraph 4 vaguely about its strongest programs (surprise, surprise, they are almost all the same, and none of that really matters anyway b/c you donāt choose a LAC based solely on majors), and so on. Iām being a little silly, but if you literally put all the major LAC Fiske Guide descriptions side by side, you will see how uninformative that book can be.
Might I suggest limiting the choices, just for purposes of finding desirable safeties / likelies, by odds of acceptance and your willingness to pay, rather than geography?
Nor to UF, and yet there it is on the list, despite the fact that you have said you know your kid would hate it there.
Then your daughter needs to start loving UF, or you need to start thinking of schools where she has a high likelihood of admittance as something other than āmediocre.ā
I can understand not wanting to pay full-freight at a mediocre school when your child can get into a ābetterā school (though in most cases, your child would get merit aid at such schools, and maybe you use those as your safety). But, what defines a ātopā LAC? This is interesting because the rankings change, sometimes drastically, from year to year. Our oldest went through this last year looking for a LAC (though we preferably wanted merit aid), and he wanted the spirit of Division 1 sports. At the time, if Iām not mistaken, Richmond was 23, above Bates (and Kenyon) and Colgate was 11 (Richmond and Colgate being the ones he liked best, with Lafayette right behind (Iād look at Laf as a potential safety with merit; we loved that school)). This year, with so many ties, Colgate is 16 and Richmond 25 and Bates 22. So, what defines a ātopā LAC? Is it based on history, stats, something else?
Thanks folks. To respond to Publisherās and Allyās comments, Iāll admit that not all the schools listed in my first post are on our radar, and I think you identified some of them. I was trying to be careful not to unnecessarily limit input, in the hope that Iād get a recommendation that we hadnāt considered, really to get the most from everyone elseās knowledge and experiences. To a certain extent that happened with Hamilton (for example), and we plan to take a closer look at that school. Also, too, I was hoping to start a conversation robust enough to assist others with similar questions, without being tailored too specifically to my own situation. Again, the purpose here was to get a better sense of the differences and similarities among the upper-level LACs, not to get input on what may be an appropriate safe school for my daughter. That would be a different thread.
Weāve seen āThe Hidden Iviesā at bookstores, and my D may have read some of itāIām not sure. But Iāll mention it to her.
If Florida is your state, would New College of Florida (the stateās public LAC) be a better fit than UF for her?
There are other public LACs that may be suitable as likely admit LACs: http://coplac.org/members/
One of the most direct college guidesāChoosing The Right Schoolāmay be out of print.
@havenoidea Iād love to hear how OP determined that list, as it might help me think through it. For us, ātopā LACs are just anything in the top 100 of the dreaded US News list. (I felt comfortable with that, having worked at or visited a few below the 100 cut off. Sure we might be missing a hidden gem, but we canāt worry about that too much.) We combed through top 100 and eliminated things that didnāt appeal to our kidsāmilitary colleges, places that would geographically make them miserable for health reasons, places that werenāt in the sweet spot of what they wanted in terms of rural/suburban/urban (ex: a small college town is okay as long as itās at most 2 hours from a major city by public transportation), places that we knew were super, super political, etc. That still left us with a pretty big list to go through, and they all look great on their websites and in reviews. Edit to add: and our list probably looks pretty āflakyā to an outsider, given how we went about it! 
It was Choosing the Right College by ISI, a conservative-leaning group which rated colleges in part by their political leanings (of course, students preferring a left-leaning environment could reverse the ratings in terms of desirability). There also used to be an associated web site http://collegeguide.org , but now it redirects to some other ISI page.
This is really not the best source for generic comparisons, divorced from any discussion of admissions likelihood, fit, or affordability, IMHO. The strength of CC lies in things like, āmy kid likes Unattainable School X, which is unattainable due to geography / cost / admissions likelihood, and which is liked due to important factors A, B, and C. What other schools might my kid look at?ā
My kidās stated vague objective criteria (specific level of ethnic diversity, no or only the barest nominal religious affiliation, not being an extreme outlier academically, not larger than her enormous public school) cut the list down to about 100 schools. From there, I gathered all sorts of stuff for her to narrow it down - Niche (both commentary and percentage ratings), RateMyProf (the school ratings, not the individual professor ratings), Forbes financial ratings, the schoolās description of their students, WalkScore, historical weather data, travel times and airlines, everything I could dump out of IPEDS, and supplemental essay topics. So she had a nice (enormous) spreadsheet that she could scroll through and say, āthat school really doesnāt sound like me,ā or āyes, that one is worth investigating further.ā
I donāt know what to think about New College, to be honest. Iāve heard good things about it, but when I drive by, it doesnāt seem to have much of a campus, and in fact is bisected by a busy state road leading to Sarasota. Iāve never parked and walked around. At any rate, itās undoubtedly too close to where we live for her. Itās a good recommendation for others, though.
There are a bunch of terrific recommendations for different guidebooks. Thanks!
I didāt mean to annoy anyone with my use of the word āmediocre.ā Obviously, there are a lot of terrific schools with great professors out there. I just use the phrase as personal shorthand for the imaginary line of when the public options in our state seem to be as good as the private or out-of-state public schools, especially those schools that are a thousand miles away or more.
The above doesnāt take into account factors like campus and average class size. My wife, who is following along, agrees with all of you that we shouldnāt consider UF as a safe school if my daughter doesnāt want to go thereāsheās said that for months. I can sense another loooooong discussion about this over dinner tonight. My daughter has been following along, too, and I think Iāve already said that she can out-argue me, so it looks like Iām in for a long meal. 
Personally, I think being in the enviable position of being able to consider these colleges without regard to cost is a tremendous advantage. I hope DD appreciates how rare that is these days!
If the only objection to NCF is too close to home, that does not seem to be significant in reality if she lives on campus. Would she prefer UF over NCF?
Remember that if she has no safety, her default safety is the local community college ā not necessarily a bad choice, but could be a let down for those aspiring to super selective colleges.
@allyphoe Do you mean the Fiske Guide?
Yes, thatās exactly what I meant.