Reed has been ranked no. 1 in terms of STEM PhD production. Oberlin is up there as well. Colorado is a good all around school, but it doesn’t do well in contrast to the other two on most fronts.
Reed and Oberlin are excellent but VERY different. Reed is often thought of as a small version of Chicago, and the liberal arts counterpart of Caltech, where lots of Reedies do graduate school. Unsurprisingly, lots of Reedies go to Chicago for graduate school too. Reed is apparently comparable to Chicago and Caltech in terms of sheer rigour. The workloads are HEAVY. I believe MIT and Bryn Mawr are the other notoriously super rigorous powerhouses. Be prepared to work REALLY hard at Reed. Oberlin is more like a small Ivy. Lots of work if you want it, but no heavy heavy pressure - not bone crushing like Reed/Caltech.
An interesting number that underscores Reed’s outrageous STEM PhD production: it has a whopping 32 Rhodes Scholars. Oberlin has 16, and CC has 12 to date. To put these numbers in perspective, Reed is the tiniest by at least 50% (Amherst), and consider that Columbia has 27, Northwestern 16, Chicago 50, Penn 5, Michigan 26, Cornell 30, Georgetown 24, Amherst 20, Swarthmore 28. Reed outdoes all save for Chicago, which is 5 times bigger at the undergrad level!
(I have all this stuff at my fingertips at the moment because I just emerged from a regional college diversity conference)
Also, Colorado is the least diverse, with 2% Black, 4% Asian - both numbers are ridiculous. 9% Latino enrollment prolly reflects demographics in proximity to Colorado Springs. And a recent graduate says those numbers are recent improvements. Oberlin is the first majority school to graduate a Black student…back in 1840 or something! (Consider that stat versus Rice having an official policy of barring Blacks until 1968 I believe!) Reed’s first year class is 8% Black, 9% Latino, and something like 15% Asian in addition to the internationals. There must be factors well beyond ethnic/racial diversity (hippies?) that would contribute to CC’s alleged liberal-ness (although I am not sure what liberal means any more!)