The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price, Second Edition

32. The Beauty of Liberal Arts Colleges

I am a confessed enthusiast and supporter of the small, selective liberal arts colleges. My pulse quickens when I see students from Carleton, Haverford, and Williams who have applied to our PhD program.

—Thomas R. Cech, chemistry professor at University of Colorado and Nobel Prize winner

I ate lunch once with an extremely successful West Coast businesswoman whose children and husband graduated from Yale University. Her husband is an involved Yale alum and donor, and I got the impression that there was never any doubt that their children would head to New Haven after high school.

Before the waiter had handed us our menus, my lunch guest blurted out that her children might have been better off attending a ...