@moooop: Yes.
Thank you for all your responses! To answer your question, the main thing that I liked about both of them was the open curriculum but haven’t been able to find a ton of other schools with a similar system.
Open curriculum: To slightly varying degrees - Amherst, Hamilton, Grinnell.
Wesleyan’s curriculum can only truly be considered open for those students who have no ambition to achieve honors status.
Univ of Rochester too
It’s important to dig in a little to the details of the “open curriculum” thing. There are always SOME requirements, or requirements for honors, etc. etc. Be sure to understand what it really means before choosing or rejecting a school on that basis.
I think it’s more a question of which LACs don’t bear some resemblance to Wesleyan? W&L, Claremont-McKenna for sure. CAn’t think of too many others that don’t at least pay lip service to the same things: a more or less open-curriculum, racial diversity, liberal political outlook, strong in the sciences.
Get the Fiske guide. It provides a list of similar schools for each school in the book. It’s very useful. In fact, I would say it’s essential to anyone trying to assemble a realistic list of schools.
FWIW, I agree with many of these suggestions, as my kid was looking for the same and applied to many of the schools suggested here.
^I personally did NOT find the Fiske guide very helpful. Definitely wouldn’t consider it “essential”.
That said, the “overlaps” for Brown mentioned in the guide are: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Stanford, and Dartmouth.
And for Wellesley, they are: Brown, Middlebury, Smith, Princeton, University of Chicago, Williams, Amherst, and Barnard.
Not quite "midrange".
Of course, it would help if OP gave more details, especially the desired major.
Re #28: The OP expressed an interest in Wesleyan; Fiske overlaps tend to be asymmetrical.
My bad. I read it as Wellesley. I always confuse the two.
Here’s Wesleyan overlaps from Fiske: Brown, Yale, Tufts, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Vassar.