@tetrisfan I couldn’t agree more!! Obviously Harvard’s reputation is of an undeniable prestige but it is definitely not the only excellent school in the country!!
Harvard is very different from Pomona. It is a major research university, like Columbia, and the college is integrated into the university. Having gone to Harvard, I’m partial to it but I don’t think a Harvard student would be happy at Pomona and vice versa. I’d also hazard to say that is true of a Yale student as well. The reason isn’t that one is better than the other but that the universities are organized and constituted very differently. If you want a small LAC experience, I’d restrict myself to LACs and colleges like Pomona, Scripps, Amherst or Wiliams. The liberal arts “colleges” of the large Ivy League universities are very, very different.