One thing that makes these discussions less than satisfactory to me is the binary approach many posters take with it. There is LAC and large research and a lumping of everything non-LAC into the latter category. It seems to me that there are a lot of colleges that are elsewhere on the spectrum that are assumed to be “large research”.
It’s also interesting to talk to people who have attended some of these places to get their perspectives. I have a corporate recruiter who works for me who attended Harvard who is very defensive when anyone suggests Harvard is a big research school. She also attended HLS and is quick to distinguish between those who attended Harvard for grad/professional studies and Harvard College. She would be banned on this forum in a split second discussing this topic because she would almost scream at you that Harvard College is a LAC within the university and is in fact “the real Harvard.” Of course, the Cornell people readily and enthusiastically distinguish between A&S and CALS (which admittedly truly is a different thing), and many people in and out of Dartmouth say that it’s a large LAC that happens to have a few grad and professional schools. All of the Ivy League is described by some people as “LACs that grew up.”
I don’t know about all of that, but I know this: I have a kid at Brown now, and had two others at LACs, and I myself attended a large and well respected research university (which I greatly enjoyed btw) and a Top 5 LS. Based solely on my exposure to those places, the biggest outlier and the top candidate for “which one of these is not like the others,” was my undergraduate institution. By a long shot.
So, UT Austin, Princeton and Williams are three different animals.