Cornell is not too large. It is a good size, In fact.
Its campus looks imposing when you first tour it, but it is functionally mastered, for immediate purposes, within a week .I demonstrated that to my D2, when she was looking, in dramatic fashion by printing out a large campus map and then tearing off all the parts that she need not have anything to do with, for the near term at least. There are whole areas that you never need go into, if you do not attend that college or that housing unit. Those just provide new vistas to explore down the road. Vistas that are absent from smaller schools.
By contrast, D1 attended one of the larger LACs and was bored with the campus after a couple of years. My conclusion was the combination of a small school in a small town is not a happy marriage, IMO. I would be wary of it, unless perhaps if I could tell I fit in very well with the prevailing campus culture. If one fits well, LACs can be great. It’s less important to have tons of ready-made things to do than to have tons of great (to you) people to do them with. IMO.
Cornell requires an application and matriculation to a specific one of its colleges, true. But if that one college is its Arts & Sciences college, well that 's all Williams has. Williams students can’t apply to their Engineering college, or their agriculture college, because they don’t have one.
But Cornell CAS students can take classes at any of the colleges there. The university’s course catalog is endless. Dartmouth only has liberal arts with some engineering, right? I don’t know what goes on there frankly, in terms of applications. But most of the specialized colleges of Cornell, that people have to apply to there, do not have analogs at Dartmouth either. But Cornell CAS students can take courses at all of those specialized colleges, if they want to. Dartmouth and Williams students can’t.
A lot of Cornell students do wind up taking courses at multiple colleges there. I took courses at three of them. As a physics major in CAS I elected to take some engineering courses along the way, Subsequently I obtained a Master of Engineering degree.