I’ve been accepted at Wash U and Carnegie Mellon and I can’t decide. I would be pursuing Studio Art at either one but I also love math and would probably minor in math or physics. Which school is better for someone who wants a broad education? Also where would it be more enjoyable to live? 
Please help!
I taught math at Wash. U. for many years. The students are very bright, but the administration wants “retention” and “no problems”. Here is a summary of what happened when I taught differential equations at a level similar to MIT.
The chair of the math dep’t told me that he wanted me to make the class the normal “cookbook” course, telling me to teach students only the steps to work problems like those that will be on the test. He said to do this so that he wouldn’t have “problems”.
An Engineering Assoc. Dean (and Dean of Student Academic Integrity) was concerned about students doing poorly on an exam. I wrote him that almost all of the ones who had done poorly had cheated on the homework. He wrote back: don’t “discourage” them, “retention” is important.
Though the Math Chair kept refusing to show me the “complaints” he was “dealing with”, I finally managed to get a copy of them. Here is what I saw.
An Engineering student tutor “complained” that he “…cannot do…most [MIT} problems …and [he] received an A [in the standard “cookbook” version of the course]…”
An outraged father wrote the Deans that his “understanding” was that the average on a test was 47, and that I didn’t even curve! It was actually 67 – several points lower than the other three tests, and about 40% of the class made A’s, no one below a C. The Deans responded to the parent by asking for his son to report on whether I had “improved”. The student’s “report” made it clear that he did not even recognize that homework problems were on the test – some word for word!
The Chair of the Math Department told me that Math had just “wrested” a course from Engineering, and they weren’t going to let Engineering “wrest” this course from Math. Clearly, there was a competition to see who could meet the “wants” of a few students to the detriment of all students. The course was worth a lot to the winner’s budget. (A Dean had told a previous Chair that he wanted “no complaints”, even if that meant a reduction in standards. That is apparently how the winner is determined.)
I give this example because I was there, not because Wash. U. is the only school behaving this way. There are schools that are ok, though, but you have to beware of those that aren’t.
For much more, You can also look at my totally non-commercial site inside-higher-ed