Small School vs. Major Options?

<p>@ucbalumnus Ok, thanks for the input. As far as CM and Middlebury, I’ll try to explain what I was thinking. Claremont Mckenna has a general engineering program that I could start with, but if I really liked it, I could transfer to another school in the consortium like Pitzer or Mudd. If not, they seemed to have other stuff. Middlebury, is tougher. My bro goes there and he said the school has some sort of sister program for engineering with Dartmouth. But I’m not sure if it would work out well.
As far as USC, I guess I thought it would have smaller classes than most and was more respected. Is that true?</p>