Twenty years ago, I would not have thought these were equivalent colleges. I would have viewed Vassar as a real cut above. I knew (and respected) a whole bunch of people who had gone to Vassar in many generations, and had a relative who was a long-time faculty member there. Hamilton was a popular destination at my (very preppy) high school for jocks who liked to drink. One of my best friends in law school, and one of the smartest people in our class, was a Vassar alum; there weren’t any Hamilton alumni in our class.
I no longer have anything like that prejudice, however. In my kids’ cohort, I have a nephew and a son-in-law who went to Hamilton, and they are both supremely well educated and had really wonderful college experiences there. My nephew’s career at Hamilton is something I trot out all the time to explain how LACs can work really well for kids. He wound up with a roll-your-own major in philosophy of agriculture, and among the things the college did for him were (a) funding a summer of research into the design of community-supported agriculture programs nationwide, (b) hiring a professor at SUNY ESF to supervise him, and © serving as the lead customer in a new Clinton-area CSA he created. My son-in-law and his college friends are impressively intellectual, thoughtful adults with interesting jobs.
Vassar, meanwhile, continues to attract really smart, generally really nice kids who want a very demanding LAC experience, who value the social structure the dorm system provides (like Yale’s residential colleges), and who like the idea of being able to spend a weekend in New York City pretty easily.
This is one of those decisions in which there really isn’t any wrong answer, at least as long as the cost is relatively similar. Going either way for any reason – including flipping a coin – will be the right decision.