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<p>Harvey Mudd is a LAC, it’s not just LAC-sized. I’m not sure what you mean by not having a strong liberal arts curriculum either. Mudd is fairly serious about its liberal arts side, and has pretty strong requirements for its students (from what’s been posted here, more courses required than MIT). The mission statement of the school is:</p>
<p>“Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.”</p>
<p>And admittedly the selection of courses isn’t always great at Mudd itself, but luckily that’s no impediment with the consortium. I’m taking my anthropology course at Pomona and my video production course at Pitzer right now, just like everyone else does here. The 5C’s boast an incredibly strong liberal arts curriculum, and you get the advantage of being at a technical institute like Mudd while still taking liberal arts courses with students actually majoring in those fields. So you avoid the problem of the student body being skewed away from those subjects while still attending the top ranked undergraduate-only institution for engineering.</p>
<p>That being said, I think MIT is a hard-to-beat option (it was my number 2 pretty much for the reasons cellardweller described), and the OP expressed a desire for the East coast, where Mudd is definitely not. I had rather similar desires to the OP, wanting a good liberal arts experience while still getting the best engineering education possible, and Mudd was the best possible fit for me. MIT fell slightly below for this, but is also an incredible school for this and caught my eye over most institutions in that regard and I think it’s definitely worth considering for theimpatientone.</p>