Appreciate everyone’s input & advice on this thread. We finally visited Hamilton (& Colgate) last weekend. We used our own framework to compare the schools - outlining this below, because we found this to be useful. We compared schools across 3 categories
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Non-academic services - This generally covered services offered by college administrators, including dorms, food, study abroad programs & internships and career services. Generally an indication of how well the college is being run/ managed by administrators
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Academic Environment - This covered elements like class size, quality of faculty, research opportunities, curriculum/ choice of courses and also included academic strength of peers (mid 50% SAT range, % of from top 10% of high school class) and classroom environment
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Social fit - The most qualitative of the categories, this covered general feel of campus, interactions with other students, prevalence of Greek life/ partying, etc
It was really useful to visit both campuses and have some limited interactions with students - either on tour or in virtual hangouts. We eventually felt that
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URichmond leads on non-academic services - this is clearly an area of focus & investment for college administration. However Hamilton does most of this really well, it’s just not as well promoted as it is at URichmond - for example Hamilton offers students $4K in funding for student research but this isn’t called out unless you ask about it. URichmond markets this as the “Richmond Guarantee” (which to be fair also applies to unpaid internships)
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Hamilton clearly had a stronger academic environment, especially for Economics/ Math/CS - @merc81 pointed out Hamilton’s selectivity and the Hamilton Econ faculty is both really strong and D21 found more professors with research interests paralleling her own curiosity on economic topics. In general, Hamilton aligned with a more “intellectually curious” classroom environment vs a more “pre-professional” environment at URichmond (where the Econ department is part of the school of business).
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Last but not least Hamilton was a clear winner in terms of social fit - the students & other we met there impressed D21 by being down to earth, unpretentious and full of genuine warmth. Everyone we met at URichmond was great & very nice, but something just clicked in the interactions with Hamilton students - this was clearly D21’s crowd. We also loved the Hamilton campus, argued over the charms of the dark vs light side and eventually realized that for D21 the rural seclusion, Root Glen trails, snowy weather and much smaller size were all positives, not drawbacks (not that us parents agree with all of this !!)
Eventually, the decision of whether these positives are “worth it” is a very personal choice, but we’re fortunate to be able to afford the difference and so Hamilton College it is !!
@ProfSD thanks for your thoughts on this, sounds like my D21 & your D20 might share a lot of interests in common - they’ll probably cross paths at Hamilton 