Salary matters. So does cost of living, cost of housing and cost of schooling. 150k in rural Massachusetts is a ton of money.
Also, faculty quality also means different things at different colleges. I had a calculus professor at the U of C with an Eastern European accent so heavy that he could not be understood at all, but he was a world renowned mathematician. I’m sure it was great for his grad students to deal with him one on one. For me, it was a nightmare trying to learn from him in a large class. I had a political science professor who missed 2/3rds of the classes because he was off at conferences.
Look, no one is going to try to argue that Amherst or Pomona has a more renowned Economics research faculty than the U of C does (no university in the world does, actually). But the faculty at Amherst and Pomona are hired in large part because of teaching ability.
When Harvard wanted to improve its undergraduate teaching, they looked to Amherst to improve. “It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,” said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. “Amherst is always pointed to. Harvard should be as great at teaching as Amherst.”
So there are different ways of looking at the question. I’m my opinion, any choice is a good one, because the grads of all three of these schools all do remarkably well by any measure.