@Deaston , I’m not sure where you are getting the notion that Wes is not regarded on Wall Street. Sure it is, and there are plenty of surveys that demonstrate that. FWIW, I work in NYC and interact with a lot of people who work for investment banks, private equity, hedge funds, VC’s, and since my S was almost exclusive looking at LAC’s I made it a point over the last 18 months to ask anyone I could what they perceived of various schools. Wes was actually one of the ones mentioned the most among the LAC’s, particularly by the VC people. Of course AWS (and to a lesser extent here on the East Coast, P) always come up too, but after that Wes was the most referenced LAC my experience. That’s nothing official, but it was my cumulative impression of their brand in NYC business.
In any event, both great schools. But very different. Wes has more than twice as many students at Haverford. Haverford is in a nice suburb of Philadelphia, Wes in a working class suburb of Hartford. Haverford emphasizes its student honor code, Wes it’s strong sense of student independence. Wes has far more majors and classes to chose from due to its size (not counting the majors available to H students at Swarth and Bryn that you can do if you don’t mind traveling to the other campuses – easy for Bryn, not so much for Swarth). On that note, H does have the tri-college consortium and Wes does not. H is 20 minutes to Phily and 2 hours to NYC. H is 2 hours to NYC or 90 Boston.
In particular if you are interested in media or performing arts, Wes is probably the strongest LAC in the country. It’s film studies is renowned, it’s theater program graduated the creator of Hamilton, its world music studies are well known. It publishes a student paper twice a week (most LAC’s are weekly, some even monthly – I don’t recall which for H). It has a ton of student music groups, and the college actually dedicates a stand-alone building on the heart of campus to a totally student-run theater group that puts on about 30 shows a year. If you like theater at H you’ll need to be commuting to BM for it. Similar with music.
On the other hand, Wes keeps ending up in the press with stories about hard drug abuse and “politically correct” scandals (they temporarily defunded the student paper after students protested an editorial by a student and former vet who was mildly critical of BLS, arguing it was offensive to even give such an opinion voice even if they offered to print rebuttals). Every school has substance abuse and “safe space” issues to some degree, but Wes gets disproportionate attention for it. There’s a saying about where there’s smoke, there’s fire…
I think H is awesome, BTW. There’s an amazing sense of community and very strong academics. It’s just more narrowly focused because of it’s size. The tri-college option (plus Penn) broadens those options but it’s not the same as having it all on campus. But for what the OP said they were interested in, it shouldn’t be an issue.
You can’t go wrong either way. Both are just as likely to lead to jobs or professional schools. But they culturally will be pretty different experiences.