<p>“so a university with many professional schools only meant less proportional funding for the programs I wanted to study.”</p>
<p>You can’t make that generalization at all.</p>
<p>Undergraduate focus depends on a lot of factors that I mentioned above; student-faculty ratios are a big one, especially if you look at them carefully, as in, within the most popular departments for undergraduate majors. There are huge differences in that figure between Berkeley/Texas/Michigan and Yale/Princeton. Obviously the other factors I mentioned, such as accessibility of professors, office hours, professors who write recommendations, long research papers you have to write in the various advanced seminars (which you can take starting freshman year at Yale), etc., are also important. </p>
<p>Princeton does a great job with all of the above, but I would say Yale has the edge in these areas. </p>
<p>There is a reason why Yale is the only university on the list of the top 10 undergraduate institutions that produce future Ph.D.s. The other nine of the top 10 are small LACs. It has to do with Yale’s LAC-like undergraduate focus, which no other school matches.</p>