I agree it is not necessarily because of any deep similarity… people who are not very familiar with the schools (like people out here on the west coast) have a tendency to confuse WPI, RPI, and RIT simply because the acronyms seem similar.
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St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD or Santa Fe, NM) has a great books curriculum. It’s the old University of Chicago curriculum.
St. Olaf’s has a foundations course, Great Conversations, I think.
Reed has a strong intellectual vibe.
You can Google “schools with residential colleges” and get a list. I think St. Andrew’s in Scotland has “houses”. Lots of schools have living-learning communities.
I’m not sure what specific thing you are thinking about for the other categories. Other than being fairly selective, not sure what distinct qualities are sought.
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RIT/WPI have overlapping liberal builder culture for STEM kids… RPI is, to a great extent, too though more theory-based classes probably. (MIT has a similar overlap). Also all have SUPER nerdy clubs. model trains, ham radio, lots of cos-play and robots, and extra-nerdy frats. There are overlapping subcultures.
Northeastern/RIT/Stevens (and to an extent WPI) has the coop - pre-pro overlapping sub-cultures. I know less about Purdue/Rose… But Rose clearly has the same size vibe and a builder culture no?… Our kids ruled out in geography and more conservative/neutral schools. Mine seems very builder-y too, like WPI/RIT.. Purdue is probably outlier due to sports, but i suspect a huge subset of kids who would thrive at RIT/Stevens/Mines too.
Flagships, you are right is due to solid stem programs, but lots of kids hide in engineering 
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Perhaps stating the obvious…but many of the Jesuit schools have similar traits including (but not limited to): being mid-size universities, urban locations, having little or no Greek Life, and a large humanities core.
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I am not sure those are entirely unrelated, though. Like, I do think what I call “powerhouse” undergraduate engineering schools (this is basically about a combination of student population, devoted resources, and relative variety of more specialized programs even at the undergrad level) tend to have some cultural similarities. Possibly differences too, of course, but overlaps in ways they wouldn’t necessarily have to the same degree with the typical student mix in undergrad business schools, undergrad Arts & Sciences schools, or so on. (Edit: see also other poster articulating this in more detail.)
Of course sometimes there are large undergraduate engineering schools as one of many undergraduate programs at the same institution, and I think kids can reasonably cross-shop those with the more purely tech-focused institutions.
But even then, some kids might particularly like it when the whole undergrad program is more tech-focused. And those are the kids who might well put together lists dominated by such institutions, even if they then have more nuanced reasons for preferring some more than others.
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I’m always struck by how with the possible exception of the core part (and maybe not even that), that is a rather popular wish list in certain circles. I’d add being highly networked in areas like business, law, and politics.
Hence I find myself recommending Jesuit colleges to quite a few people who seem stuck finding alternatives to the secular private universities they are considering, but which might be a little less selective.
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I think it’s hard for me to see putting a school like Purdue (~43,000 undergrads) with a cohort of small schools like WPI and Rose. I guess RIT is a bit bigger (I just looked it up … around 20,000). I think once you start considering big flagship engineering programs, I think there’s going to be a lot more similarities in vibe between a Purdue and other excellent engineering schools at those flagships than with the small nerdy schools? But I have not really visited or investigated Purdue, so maybe there’s something in missing about this.
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Never set foot on the place, but always felt there was something nerdy about the name. Like, it’s one letter removed from the chicken company 
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So Purdue ultimately graduates around 2400 people with their primary degree in engineering per year. That is in fact a lot. I think TAMU may be the only engineering college regularly with more, and then usually not much more.
Most of the other really large engineering programs are also at publics. I believe there are only six or so privates that regularly graduate more than 500 engineers–Northeastern, WPI, RPI, RIT, Drexel, and Cornell. Even schools like MIT or CMU are typically more in the 300s, although they may add some more secondary majors.
Still, how much that matters in terms of subjective experience is an open question. Like individual classes can only be so big. You can actually only be acquaintances with so many other people, meaningful relationships with even fewer, actual friendships fewer than that. There is actually a pretty good scientific basis to believe that at 500 or so people in just your own engineering year, you have already passed the limit where more students in your undergrad program are just going to be adding more strangers, not more relationhips.
So, you can make of this what you will, but I tend to think it may not matter that much exactly how big your engineering program is, once it is this big. Distinct from a program where, say, there may be 100 people or less in your year? Sure. But will it really make a material difference if it is 2500 or 1500 or 500 per year? Maybe not so much.
My Purdue grad had 180 in her chemical engineering major. This was her cohort for three years. She had classes ranging from 10 -80 people (after intro classes freshman year)with most classes being around 25. Her honors cohort was also quite small.
When my daughter was thinking about overlap she was more focused on the approach rather than overall school size. She had plenty of smaller schools that had the same teaching approach as Purdue and felt similar. She recently told me that if she hadn’t been accepted at Purdue, RPI would have been her second choice.
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Not true. According to each school’s career center, about 100 seniors a year find their way into what may broadly be described as Finance and Consulting jobs. TBH, I think there may be more than a correlation between the number who go into that sort of work and the size of Amherst and Wesleyan’s respective football, wrestling, soccer, lacrosse and perhaps even field hockey rosters.
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Both are similar in another way: engineering students start as undeclared engineering, and must go through secondary admission to get into specific majors.
Other schools that do this include NCSU, VT, Minnesota, Ohio State, Penn State. Wisconsin is effectively similar in this respect, with GPA thresholds higher than 2.0 to stay in engineering majors.
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agree Purdue is an outlier there -and honestly didn’t realize it was THAT big # of undergrads thought it was like ~25k undergrads (I should have looked up, apologies!)…at some level I am not ~15-25k undergrads matters (though 5K - 25k does) I suspect 40+ does though..
Though some students really do care about different things. Mine didn’t care one bit about city vs. suburban locations…. some care a lot. Mine really didn’t mind much about sizes either and had a big range (though not up to 40K though not sure there ARE any with 40K in geography we were looking ha!). The looked at clubs, vibes, and the feeling/culture of school. My older really had a sense if faculty and staff really seemed to care about students at open houses and admitted students, and that was their north star. (ended up at RIT where the department head was at the Sat admitted student day and held a sign w/department name and led kids (like a parade) to the department building across campus and was with them all day going to sample classes, answering questions, helping with A/V when it broke ;). That spoke to them that all departments had faculty doing this, not students or grad students… And this isn’t a tiny school, as you pointed out…
But I do agree, purdue can fall off my list:)
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Oberlin - St. Olaf - Lawrence U
College/conservatory model (or at least a very strong music program), liberal arts, residential campuses (most students live on campus all four years), Midwestern
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