<p>I think you should visit WashU, Rice, and UChicago. WashU students are very happy and smart, but they’re not pretentious. If they were pretentious, they would’ve gone to schools with more bragging rights, which I’m pretty sure they could if they wanted to. I was a transfer from a BigTen state school and I could see the difference in student body. Big state schools are not bad, but because they take in a lot of in-staters who might be not as smart as the out-of-staters, you tend to meet many lazy and unmotivated students. Even at previous uni’s business school and engineering school which were ranked quite highly in the USNews ranking, there were still so many lazy students who only cared about partying. So yeah, if you are an international student who has to pay out of state tuition, you would be better off attending a small or medium size private university. From your list, I think UChicago would fit you best. </p>