Just picking up on the comments about WUSTL, I think this captures something that can be hard to explain to people who wonder why it is considered so desirable by some kids, when it doesn’t appear to have the very top rankings for any given department. But the thing I think it does so well is transcend that whole structure. It offers really exciting, thoughtful, well-resourced programs for pretty much everything it does, not just its “top” areas, and then it makes it easy to connect and combine between the many different things it does.
Of course lots of colleges do that to some degree. But I think WUSTL is really far in that direction, particularly for a university versus an LAC. And unlike an LAC, it does have the full resources of an R1/AAU research university. Pretty cool.