Unless you are a top .01% genius, most UNDERGRADUATE majors at most reputable colleges will have enough classes and enough talented professors to teach you the subject. I’m not saying that studying physics at University of Maine is the same as studying physics at CalTech…I’m saying that if you end up majoring in a less-prominent subject at a reputable school, chances are you will still be able to get a good education in that field. So, in most cases, for undergraduates, I would vote for choosing the colleges with overall good reputations rather than focusing on individual departments. Possible exceptions would be extreme cases where a department is something really special, like journalism at Missouri & Syracuse, philosophy at Pittsburgh, film at USC.