I’m looking for smaller schools where some faculty and all students live in same small residential college community for 4 years. It’s very different than what huge student bodies with half or more living off campus can ever experience. Yale, Rice and Caltech seems to be closest to Oxford/Hogwarts in US.
In the US that’s really a LAC. For example, Williams (which touts it’s version of a ‘tutorial system’ is about 2000 students total. Most of the Colleges That Change Lives are smaller again.
We are looking for a college with less than 5,000 undergrads, residential colleges mandatory and faculty living with students so they have a close knit community with easy access to professors and other resources. There should be year around internship opportunities nearby.
LAC are fantastic for some but a small rural college town with less students than our high school, is not what he is looking for so Williams is not suitable for this kid.
Our son attended a very LAC-like New England boarding school and is now at a college with 4,000 students (albeit not a traditional LAC). We lived in the Boston area for more than ten years. I have a pretty good idea. 
The Res College at Michigan is 800 students housed in East Quad. Though I loved wandering around campus, I rarely needed to leave my beautiful, ivy-covered dorm.* I never set foot on North Campus or attended a football game and only had three classes with more than 30 students. By senior year, I was mostly in seminars with ten or fewer students. I had no idea how big the U really was. For good or bad, my Michigan education experience was small classes, easy access to my professors (many of whom I got to know quite well), and a tight community defined by the space between East Quad and the Diag. It felt very small and intimate to me. This was in the late 70s. Perhaps things have changed, but we were in Ann Arbor for DH’s 40th reunion last month and the Res College was just where we left it.
There’s a nice video at the bottom of this page:
https://lsa.umich.edu/rc/prospective-students/why-choose-the-rc-.html
(It probably helped that DH lived on my hall. 
)
Some LACs may fit most of your requirements. There are some urban LACs for example that have year-round internships. (Most US students do the internship part differently. They intern during summers or some college have breaks in January for internships – Bennington. The colleges often offer help to the students in finding these internships and some of them provide funding for non-funded internships. Check individual colleges for their policies.)
Vassar comes to mind. Poughkeepsie is a large enough city to offer year-round internships and the career office has listings (or it did at one time and probably still does). Also it’s on the commuter train line to NYC and it’s possible to go to the City for a day trip. It’s a long commute for a single day but possible for shows and museums, etc. Vassar also had at least SOME faculty in the residence halls. They had apartments in some of the residence halls for some faculty. Not all faculty.
Sarah Lawrence has the one-on-one experience with professors. It’s 20 minutes from NYC on a train.
Other urban LACs include–
Trinity in Hartford
Connecticut College in New London
Bates in Lewiston, Maine
Occidental in Los Angeles
Mills in the San Francisco Bay Area
Reed in Portland
Lewis & Clark in Portland
St. Olaf is 40 miles from Minneapolis but has buses
Ithaca
U of Rochester is a small uni but may have what you’re looking for
Wesleyan possibly is small enough and the town is large enough for your needs
Rhodes in Memphis
Centre in Lexington
Earlham
Barnard in NYC
Near Philly and within 20 minutes of the city –
Haverford
Swarthmore
Bryn Mawr – actually looks like a Scottish castle BTW
Simmons in Boston
Boston College
Wellesley – near Boston
LACs near or in lively small towns with year-round potential for work
- Smith
- Hampshire – lots of one-on-one time iwth professors
- Mt. Holyoke
- Amherst
If you attend any one of these four colleges, you can take classes at the others. Free buses take you around.
Skidmore – in Saratoga
Actually, I don’t think that this exists. It certainly doesn’t at Oxford/Cambridge/Durham (undergrads + faculty are definitely not a “close community” - though the undergrads are tight with each other- and year-round internship opportunities are non-existent for the majority of students). Rice might be the closest, as it is in a city (for internships) and there is a resident faculty member and other faculty/admin are involved- but classes are not held within the college. Yale students don’t have classes in their houses. Even at Hogwarts, classes were by subject, not within the individual houses.
Yale has classes in each residential college. http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/college-seminars/
That said, Residential College Seminars are intentionally outside of traditional departments, are intentionally limited (four total per student), and only 1/3 of the seats are reserved for students in that college.
thank for the amplification, @allyphoe- I was too broad 
Actually, I’ll correct myself (thanks to @Dustyfeathers!). The Consortium schools are the closest thing to what you are looking for. Take the the Claremont Mckenna group (C-Mck/ Mudd, Pomona, Scripps): separate colleges, but nearly contiguous campuses, each college is self-contained & prides itself on faculty engagement with students. Others include the Massachusetts 5-college and the Pennsylvanian Quaker groups.
At Rice, each residential college has a Magister (professor and family) that lives in a university owned private home adjacent to each residential college. The magister hosts events for the students throughout the year.
Huh. That’s an interesting perspective on the consortium schools, @collegemom3717
They do have their own distinct personalities and many of the individual schools aren’t that big.
OP the consortium schools (some of them have already been mentioned) include –
- Claremont group (Claremont MC, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Scripps, Pitzer) -- all 5 min walk from each other
- Five Colleges in Massachusetts (Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, UMass Amherst, Smith) -- all have a free bus system among them and are 10-30 minutes apart depending on the school
- The Quaker Consoritum (Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, UPenn) -- free regular buses among all of the schools but UPenn and for that the students can take a train to Philly -- about a 20 minute trip to Philly. Haverford to BMC is like 10 minute trip. Swarthmore to Haverford and BMC is like 30 minute trip.
Basically if you get into one of the consortium schools you can take classes at any of the others. Each school has a distinct personality.
*always forget Pitzer… tx @Dustyfeathers
Rice for sure. Dartmouth has recently added this.
Vanderbilt has it partially rolled out. But 100% full implementation is still about 5 years away with several new residential colleges currently under construction. It should be beautiful once finished.
Notre Dame has a version of this with their “stay hall” system.
MIT has four year houses, with an MIT faculty family resident in each house
and graduate student residents on each floor.
https://studentlife.mit.edu/housing
Some students do join sororities or fraternities and leave their house though.