<p>These schools are so different that it’s hard to know what to tell you. Swarthmore is a small, 1,500 student ultra-intellectual Liberal Arts College located on a beautiful campus in a suburb of Philadelphia. Vanderbilt is a southern medium-sized terrific research university with Division 1 athletics. Vanderbilt has a separate music school as well as a separate education school, besides the school of arts and sciences. Swarthmore is one of the only small schools with an engineering major, but you just get a BS in Engineering. You don’t study a specific subfield. You would go to graduate school in engineering to specialize. I don’t know what else to tell you. Have you thoroughly gone through the web sites of each school, reading students blogs and as much as you possibly can about each school? These are REALLY different schools.</p>