<p>Tyler, on the basis of a few threads I have seen here, you seem like a super guy – smart, centered, passionate, thoughtful. You really can’t go wrong with your college choices. All of the colleges you are looking at have incredible resources and opportunities to offer you, more and better than you could find at any other institution, and more than you will possibly be able to pursue in four years. The opportunities at each may be slightly different, but I am confident you will sniff out what is cool and exciting at whatever college you wind up attending, and you will do that, and you will be excited and happy about it and glad you went there, not giving a thought to what you might have been doing elsewhere.</p>
<p>So . . . you don’t have to overanalyze. Go with your gut. It will be fine. Flip a coin if you need to, or throw some darts, or cut cards. Whatever happens, your life will be different, but the outcome will be the same: great.</p>
<p>That said, there’s one tiny corner of things you may want to explore further. I am a little chary of your statement that you plan to major in Economics, but want to take as few math courses as possible. At a high level, wherever you are, as currently practiced and as practiced for the foreseeable future, Econ = math. It is heavily math dependent, more so the deeper into the field you progress. Wanting to do Econ with minimal math is perilously close to wanting to be a crummy economist. Not a great ambition.</p>
<p>Now, I am uniquely unqualified to lecture you on this because I took a bunch of Econ courses in college without cracking a math book. I loved the concepts, thought the way of looking at the world was really interesting, it was great balance to my main area of study (literature and literary theory), and it signaled to potential employers that my feet were on the ground even if my head was in the clouds. But the more I understood, the more I wished I knew more math, was more facile with it.</p>
<p>If you look at top undergraduate econ programs, you may see some actual difference in their degree of mathiness. My impression is that Stanford and Chicago are at the mathiest end of the spectrum, and Yale isn’t. I’m not certain about Harvard – it may be somewhat double-tracked so that the potential grad students are math-immersed and the pre-laws aren’t necessarily. (Yale is probably like that, too.)</p>