<p>I honestly feel that you will get the best undergrad physics education at a research university. This has been highly contested on this board, but honestly, the best research opportunities are all at research institutions and there is a much broader range of courses you can take, including graduate courses. You also can become friends with graduate students who are a great resource for advice and your professors may be very well known in their fields. I know people will argue that you can just do an REU, but those are only ten weeks as most people don’t get much done, especially if you haven’t had a high quality research experience before. You should do research doing the year to be competive for grad school especially.
I am currently visiting grad schools I have been accepted to including 4 top ten schools. I have been to one open house so far, and honestly most people seem to come from well known private and state universities. I have not seen many liberal arts students at all. I have also heard from one student attending a fairly well known LAC that LAC students typically do worse on the physics GRE which is actually nontrivial in grad admissions. This is unclear though.
Most Ivy League schools have great physics departments with the exception Dartmouth. Uchicago is phenomenal, MIT, Caltech, many of the UCs, Michigan, Minnesota, Penn State, Illinois, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State, uwashington, UT Austin etc.</p>