The best universities have great resources, research opportunities, big campuses, diverse graduate programs - you name it. However, there are plenty of great liberal arts colleges that are essentially on par with what the Ivies and the other top colleges like Stanford and Duke have to offer.

The biggest benefit of choosing a liberal arts college is their level of attention and focus on the undergraduate experience. Even if you’re just a lowly freshman or sophomore, you will be working with top faculty members in an excellent student-to-teacher ratio setting. Some kids who go to great schools like Columbia or Harvard sometimes complain that in some of their larger lecture courses, they had limited contact with professors, or professors were all-together absent because basic courses were taught by graduate students. If you want to completely mitigate this an issue, go to a top LAC.

A benefit to exceptional undergraduate training at top LAC is that you will be extremely prepared for graduate school. The guidance and preparation that comes from an undergraduate-centric environment will make that transition to independent research much easier.

Check out some great schools like Williams, Pomona, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Claremont McKenna, Kenyon, Carleton, or Reed just to get a sense of the LAC options available.

Or if you are a woman considering an all-female institution, take a look at the classics like Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr on the East Coast, or Scripps and Mills, both in California.