<p>A few colleges that haven’t been mentioned, and probably deserve to be:</p>
<p>The University of Rochester, which has been modeling itself on Chicago for the past 20 years or so, with some real success. Rochester isn’t a giant city, to say the least, but thanks to the importance of Xerox and Polaroid in their heydays, it punches way above its weight.</p>
<p>Haverford, like Swarthmore, is a very intellectual, demanding college about a 20 minute train ride from Center City Philadelphia. It’s smaller than Swat, and not as pretty (or pretentious), but it’s a great college, and benefits from consortium arrangements with Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Penn.</p>
<p>Pomona is sort of the Swarthmore of the West Coast (and not any easier to get into). The other Claremont Colleges (they share an extended campus and a library, and combined they are roughly the size of Yale or Princeton) are also great, especially Harvey Mudd (for math and science) and Claremont McKenna. Pretty suburban, though – it’s not that easy to get to cool places in LA.</p>
<p>The other thing, too, is that in lots of high-quality public universities there will be a substantial Chicago-like subculture. It may not be as ubiquitous (or as oppressive) as at Chicago, but the “Chicago” embedded in the University of Michigan may be almost as large as the University of Chicago itself. Among the public universities where my kids’ friends who are highly intellectual had great experiences were also the University of Toronto and McGill University. They are both huge, and serve a wide range of students, but they have close to a duopoly on smart, intellectually ambitious Canadians (and attract plenty of U.S. students, too), so each of them has a strong intellectual cohort alongside other people who are just looking for job skills and qualification.</p>