I am a physician-scientist who graduated from Amherst. I have been a faculty member at several of the major research universities in the U.S-Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Duke. I would say that in terms of research opportunities, there are more undergraduate research opportunities at major research universities. It also is more likely to be cutting edge and the work environment will be more representative of what one will typically expect if one chooses science as career. If you want the best research experience as an undergrad, then attending a research university will give you the most opportunities to do so. However, it also is likely that your research experience will involve working with a post-doc rather than a faculty member. This may be fine since major research universities tend to draw the next generation of leaders in science. However, the primary goal for a post-doc is to generate data and to publish important papers rather than to teach; so the student’s learning experience in the laboratory will highly depend upon the willingness and ability of the post-doc to teach. Furthermore, learning to do research as an undergrad is only one facet in preparing for a scientific career.
I would say that students at Amherst and other LACs will get better teaching and possibly better mentoring in the sciences than at major research universities. They will have much closer interactions with professors if they choose to do their research at Amherst. The critical thinking and discussions encouraged in small, intimate science classes will be different than the way one learns the same material when the professor presents it to 400 students in a lecture format. Additionally, many Amherst students also will do research at other institutions (perhaps near their homes) during the summer. I recommend it highly for LAC students as a type of internship experience if they are considering a career in science in order to see what type of lifestyle that entails. I previously have hosted several Amherst students in my laboratory. However, I believe that there are hard to define, perhaps intangible, benefits to learning science at a liberal arts college, that seem to provide a strong foundation for success in science. Perhaps it is the broad liberal arts education, development of good writing and communication skills, encouragement to pursue one’s passion, and excellent mentoring that has enabled places like Amherst to train Nobel laureates in a much higher proportion than many primarily research institutions. https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-start-1.20757 In this article in Nature, Amherst ranked in the top 10 institutions for producing Nobel Prize winners on a per capita basis. It probably is ranked even higher now since this list was compiled in 2016 and another Amherst alum, Jeffrey Hall, received a Nobel in 2017. Since Amherst may only have about 20-25% science majors per class, and this list was determined on a capita basis, it is amazing that it is just behind MIT which certainly has a much higher percentage of students majoring in the sciences than Amherst.