@ucbalumnus - In response to your post #117- yes, there are more and less pre-professionally oriented students at various colleges. There are plenty of pure liberal arts majors at both Cornell and Penn (e.g., one of my former students who went to Penn for undergrad specialized in Classics and was going on for a PhD the last I heard), and some of the brightest minds in the world will be both teaching and majoring in the liberal arts at that level of university! And yes, there will be a few students at LACs like Williams or Swarthmore with a preprofessional focus and drive, although they will need to major in a liberal art because that is the only option; your examples of the premed bio major and prebusiness economics major are good examples that support my point.
My point was that it seems unfair to universities to paint all universities as more preprofessionally oriented and all LACs as less so. There are plenty of intellectually oriented people at the top examples of both types of college experience.
If you want a highly specific preprofessional major (e.g., physical therapy or hotel management), you would not pick a college like Amherst. But if you want a history or philosophy major, you could be happy at Cornell. There are many substantive differences between those two colleges, but intellectualism is not one of them.