This would be difficult to respond to without relying on at least one statistic. Hamilton’s 25th percentile SAT score of 1410 places its student body among those of the top few dozen colleges in the country by this standard. You should expect the students at Hamilton to be highly academically prepared and motivated and, for this reason, you should not be surprised that many of them make Dean’s List. That noted, based on the evident strength of Hamilton’s economics and math departments, I can’t think of a better college at which to prepare for graduate school in the field of economics. However, you would need to be completely honest with yourself as to whether you would want to seek this degree of academic challenge. If not, then I think you would feel more comfortable within the more academically wide-ranging student body of Smith.