Both schools are terrific and will serve you well pre-professionally. You cannot make a bad choice. Just pick the school that has the culture that you want.
My daughter and I like to read student reviews on Unigo and on Niche. These will give you some cultural insight and insight into what students like and don’t like.
Also…the rankings are crap. Both schools were victimized by ranking methodological changes.
But plummeting so far in rankings shows just how junky the rankings really are.
Remember that school ranking companies SELL things for profit. Alumni will “tune in” when their school climbs 10 spots or falls 20 spots. Alumni are less likely to buy when the schools have about the same ranking every year (which is what you would expect).
Wake has risk because you won’t have gotten there.
You never know what turns a prospective student one direction or another. For example, my daughter loved the W&L campus and hated Wake.
To 99%, a dumb reason - each of the buildings on the outside had a parking lot (instead of centralized garages like many schools). She thought as we drove around the campus it was like an office park.
A zillion kids/families say Wake is beautiful - but that turned her off.
I have no idea if you’ll love Wake or not - and unless you visit, you won’t know either - so if there’s any way, you have to go!!
Otherwise, and not saying not to choose it, but if you have strong feelings about W&L (do you?), then you already have a near risk-free choice.
One difference will be sports - do you love big time sports? Wake has it (ACC sports) and W&L doesn’t.
But W&L has a Japanese tea room…I don’t think Wake does
As others suggested, in many ways these are actually pretty close cousins. In our feederish HS they tend to appeal to the same sorts of kids, and they are pretty much peers in terms of academic reputation.
There really is no such thing as pre-law, and either will be a good place to work on being a good reader and writer (my standard advice for actually preparing to do well in law school). And pre-med is just a common set of prereqs, for which both of these colleges will be equally good, and pretty much equally hard/competitive.
So the big differences are the obvious ones. W&L is a very traditional sort of small independent college in a very small town in a pretty isolated rural area. Wake Forest is a significantly larger university, with D1 sports, in a decent-sized city.
So personally, I would decide on that basis. It can be a close call, and you can go either way, but whichever of those sounds a bit better to you, I would go with.
