<p>Look for access to actual scholars with PhDs in linguistics. </p>
<p>When I looked into this some years ago, I found a lot of schools had no linguists at all! What a joke!. </p>
<p>The only LACs that had linguistics professors (note the plural) were Swarthmore and Pomona. Going to one of the 5 colleges, around UMASS, the almighty linguistics powerhouse that it is, might make sense. Amherst is walkable. . </p>
<p>Another option that is probably better is to attend a small to mid-size university that has serious linguistics. Some good options for linguistics include Brandeis, Brown, Chicago, Dartmouth, Harvard, Johns Hopkins (linguistics is within the cognitive science department but is very real), MIT, Rice, Rochester, Yale. </p>
<p>Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern and Penn are larger schools with solid linguistics</p>
<p>Princeton and Columbia don’t have linguistics departments. </p>