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<p>Having a co-located school of journalism, music, or engineering does not necessarily make a small to mid-sized college of arts & sciences much different from a LAC (think of Oberlin, Lawrence, or Rice). What matters more, I think, is the presence of a full-fledged graduate school of arts and sciences. With that comes shared faculty, TAs, more focus on research, more robust facilities (libraries, labs), and more course offerings. Usually, it also correlates with larger undergraduate class sizes.</p>
<p>There don’t seem to be too many research universities with only 7000 or so students. William & Mary and Rice fall approximately in that range. Tufts is a little bigger (~9500). Columbia, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, WUSTL, and Yale all have 5000-10000 undergraduates, but also another 5000 or more grad students.</p>