<p>I don’t think you have to do anything extraordinary on the national level to get into Ivy Leagues - most of the people I know who went to one for undergrad, including the students I worked with when I was at Columbia, had not done any anything nationally noted. It of course helps, but most of them were regular high-achieving kids (by which I mean extraordinary already in a lot of different ways, but they weren’t all Intel winners or played at Carnegie Hall or whatever).</p>
<p>I don’t understand why you can’t apply to both kinds of schools, anyway. You could pick a few of each and apply to them, in addition to your matches and safeties.</p>
<p>I don’t think LACs or universities provide a “better” experience - it’s going to be very subjective and based upon the desires and personality of the student themselves. The professors are likely to have been educated at the same places, as elite LAC jobs are pretty competitive. (Take a look at the professors at Amherst and Swarthmore and you’ll see that not only were they educated at similar places to the professors at Yale and Harvard, but at the time of hire they were similar in profile to some of those Yale and Harvard professors who were hired at the assistant professor level.) The best LACs will have resources comparable to some of the best universities - scaled down in size, of course. (No, Amherst’s libraries will not have the same number of volumes as Harvard’s library - but you won’t need all those volumes anyway as an undergrad, and with interlibrary loan you can probably get virtually anything you want.)</p>
<p>The biggest difference is going to be</p>
<p>-Size. LACs are small, generally < 2,500 students, while Ivy Leagues tend to be more medium-sized, with between 4,000 and 10,000 students (and then there’s Cornell, with 14,000+ undergrads). That’s going to affect your class sizes a little (most classes at the Ivies are still pretty small) and also the number of people you interact with over your four years, as well as the number of on-campus organizations and social activities. Size will also affect the classes offered - larger universities tend to offer a wider range of specialized upper-level electives (“Japanese Politics in the Interwar Period”). But, again, the elite universities have more resources and they’re also pretty likely to offer those kinds of seminars - just fewer of them, because they have fewer professors overall. Also if you go to one in a consortium, like Amherst or Swarthmore, you can take those classes at a nearby research university if you want.</p>
<p>-Lack of grad students, or at least any significant number of grad students. So you don’t have to compete with grad students for attention from professors, which means more direct roles for you in the research of your professors; you also don’t have to take classes taught by grad students. However, I’m not sure that either of those things bothers Ivy League students too much, as the grad students sole-teaching classes tend to be advanced grad students who aren’t too far away from new assistant professors themselves, and in some cases may be more interesting than their professors. And the trade-off to having grad students in the lab is that you can do more interesting, cutting-edge research, because the professors have their assistance.</p>
<p>Also, I agree that your grad degree is going to really be the name-brand that will be important when you run for office. However, if you want to go into politics, you definitely don’t need a PhD in political science, nor do you probably want one. Political science is very different from politics.</p>