<p>Gonna be honest and say that if I was choosing, that description wouldn’t seem helpful to me as it basically sounds like Emory with exception of football (this can and often does make a huge difference in atmosphere). There are challenging pre-med courses and freshmen seminars here also (this goes for nearly all top schools). The curriculum/academic experience for a non-engineering (by virtue of us not having an engineering school) pre-med student will be about the same at both, except I’ve seen gen. chem and orgo. material from both schools, and we take the cake there in terms of difficulty. Our exams tend to ask more application/conceptual questions (they like to ask why) as opposed to procedural. This can be a killer as many of us are merely good at memorizing computations, etc… Your son perhaps dodged bullets there. However, he has to deal with Vandy’s bio, where most sections will be harder and the easier ones are about the same as ours. Your poor child; luckily they curve bio there. We don’t. With that said, hopefully your son won’t need the curve 
. </p>
<p>Anyway, bottom-line is that the OP needs to visit both. </p>
<p>Random: I also thought Vandy had less freshmen. Didn’t know they had 1600. Thought we were nearly exactly the same size. In fact, I thought we were slightly larger. Interesting.</p>