You are missing the point. I was not criticizing Northwestern in any way, and I was fully acknowledging that Northwestern’s program is larger. But this is a question about undergraduate education, not grad school. Amherst is tiny and its class offerings are limited, but those limited offerings are strong, and those are the classes that undergraduates actually take to get their grounding in this interdisciplinary field. Neuroscience is a small and elite program at Amherst, you have to apply specially to get in to it, and the students who do it all get the opportunity to do original research because there are no grad students to do that research.
Northwestern is a great university, doing cutting edge research. However, the argument that Northwestern automatically has a significant advantage FOR AN UNDERGRADUATE due to a larger program would apply equally to, say Ohio State or the University of Minnesota or University of Florida, all of which have huge programs.
Anyhow, I only interjected myself because Bala said that Amherst was not a science strong LAC. That’s not really true, unless you discount entirely the idea that a LAC can be good at, well, anything.