Not trying to be patronizing, sorry. Really, seriously, puzzled by your comments and trying to be helpful to OP, who seems to have limited access to information.
The fact you attended a college prep school, especially if it was a New England boarding school, changes the meaning of your post, because that’s not “high school” in the most common meaning of the word.
Just as puzzling to you is the fact that the first big difference that struck me is the existence of D1 sports and the importance they could have at some national universities, illustrating YMMV for the OP. 
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You support my point that it depends upon the individual.
Regardless, National Universities offer more resources and depth.
If every single LAC in the US closed down tomorrow, it would be of little significance in the scheme of higher education in the US.
Fair enough as I agree that private prep schools offer a very different experience than does the typical public high school in the US.
As a related side comment: I have often heard prep school students comment that they feel as though they had gone through 8 years of college after receiving their BA/BS degree.
what do u mean ?
so how about an national universities closed down if they don’t rank in top 20 ?
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That’s an extremely immature comment. This whole argument is immature. Both are completely unhelpful in answering the original question. It sounds like you didn’t fit in at a LAC and now have a grudge against all of them. This comment in particular is just simply not true and you know it. With the hundreds of thousands of people who graduate from LACs every year, they obviously have a major impact on the higher education landscape. And the original point of this discussion was a comparison between National Universities and LACs and how to rank them. If you wanted to share your personal negative experience with the op as anecdotal evidence, that would have been welcome and appreciated, but instead you came on the attack to fulfill your personal interests.
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i agree that liberal arts are inferior to National universities in resources but how do you make sure that depth and teaching quality are not as good as , especially for the high ranking of liberal arts college ?
i agree with you i think LAC has an big impact on our world whttps://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/which-colleges-do-facebook-google-and-other-top-employers-recruit
in this link i saw that much of lac college has a large number of employees in many big companies
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Funny, I’ve heard them refer to it as 8 years of high school.
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While the small interactive classes starting at the frosh level is the usual stated advantage (particularly for frosh/soph level courses) of LACs, the usual tradeoff is a more limited upper level course offerings. How much this matters depends on the student and subject. A not-too-advanced student in a major with a relatively well defined set of core upper level courses who prefers small interactive classes would be the best academic fit for a LAC that offers that major. A highly advanced student who has already taken the frosh/soph (and maybe even some upper level) college courses in the major and wants to go deep in upper level and graduate level courses would be a poor academic fit for most LACs and would not find a “superior undergraduate education” (this most commonly comes up with highly advanced math majors).
In a few cases, cross registration and calendar / schedule synchronization with a conveniently nearby research university can allow LAC students to get the best of both. Barnard with Columbia would be an example of such.
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this is because lac just care about undergraduate programme ? , not to tell about excellent student who can learn graduate level
The lists of named colleges providing large numbers of employees to various industries do not include many LACs, although that is to be expected because LACs tend to be small.
My primary dissatisfaction with the LAC experience was the lack of diversity in all of its forms and FWIW I am a straight, white, athletic & academically oriented male from an upper middle class family.
My second biggest source of displeasure was the dominance of the Greek system on the social life even though I was a member of my first choice fraternity.
I was not an outcast by any measure during my LAC years academically, athletically, or socially.
Again, my main sources of dissatisfaction were due to lack of diversity & dominance of the Greek system socially.
P.S. As I stated in my first post in this thread, one can earn a solid education in any school, library, or on one’s computer.
Also, I do not include the military academies in my references to LACs and I think a couple of LACs–such as Wesleyan–are exceptions due to size of student body, offerings, locations & presence of grad students.
P.P.S. With respect to LACs, fit is very important–moreso than with respect to the typical National University.
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Regarding the OP’s question about LAC rankings, I agree that the T20 and T50 LACs have a lot more in common than the rankings would suggest, particularly if you pull out the US service academies which are listed as LACs in the US News. There will be difference in resources based on endowments and alumni giving, some schools may have newer and spiffier labs, arts facilities, or athletic facilities. They may have different cultures and focus, but an engaged student can get an excellent education and have an excellent undergrad experience at any of them. So no, the different rankings between say, Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, or Hamilton and Dickinson, should not persuade a student that Wellesley or Hamilton is “worth it” but not Bryn Mawr or Dickinson.
When we started the LAC search for my kid a number of years ago, my professor spouse was skeptical about the education offered at LACs in the T20-50 range, my kid’s target range since he needed substantial merit to make the finances work. Since I’m both stubborn and a born-researcher, I dove in to examine the metrics he considers meaningful – the faculty at LACs. For him, the quality of the professor’s Ph.D. training is what matters – are they serious academics who had been trained by top thinkers in their field? So I had charts showing where faculty in specific departments relevant to my spouse and kid, at a range of LACs, earned their Ph.D. We could do this because we know a lot more than the typical family about graduate education, things like, Pitt and Rutgers are leading Philosophy programs, and Cincinnati is a top Classical Archaeology program. Guess what? The faculty at the top 10 LACs were not a different level of “illustrious” than at the Top 20, or Top 30 or Top 50. The focus on professional training of the faculty may not be a meaningful metric for a lot of families, but for our family, it showed that the “playing field” was a lot more level across the T50 on a metric that mattered to my spouse.
Bottom line, build a list which meets your needs, looking for schools with similar values and priorities that you care about, across the rankings, and don’t get stuck looking only at T20.
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i agree that if some students are too good to just learn undergraduate programme that they want to learn higher such as graduate but how about those who just want to learn undergra programme ?
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Did you attend Washington & Lee or a similar school at the low end of diversity and high end of fraternity / sorority participation? That would not be representative of LACs (or any other type of college) in general.
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I believe the poster was referring to the 2015 Forbes ranking that was tucked inside the article toward the bottom.
Yes, broadly speaking.
In some subjects, isn’t tenure-track faculty hiring so competitive that the illustriousness of tenure-track faculty is high even going a lot further down the rankings?
Of course, lower-resourced (probably more commonly lower ranked) colleges may rely more on adjuncts for the less desirable (to the student) reasons*, although even the adjuncts may be pretty high on the illustriousness level.
But then each college’s department may have different ideas of what content to teach and how to teach it, regardless of how illustrious the faculty are.
*As in providing flexible capacity management in lower level courses, as opposed to the more desirable reason to get an outside-of-academia perspective for a specialty elective.