Williams College's primary student body composition is affluent upper middle class white persons. It is #1 on the US News & World Report and has a fairly high n

Williams College's primary student body composition is affluent upper middle class white persons. It is #1 on the US News & World Report and has a fairly high number of cross admits with Harvard/Yale. So everyone is high achieving/extremely driven. The primary differentiator is that it disproportionately attracts students who are very much sold on the "study a broad liberal arts education for the sake of education and forsake career oriented life skills". I.E. the attitude that gets mocked daily on reddit. I.E. the sort of idealism that led Paul Graham to study Philosophy in college (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html) is omnipresent on campus. Almost everyone starts an idealist. This continues at Williams for a few years, until people panic and realize they don't have too many bankable life skills to get a real job. However, everyone is, or is surrounded by affluent, successful, career-oriented people. So they look around to find one of those successful career paths that are still open to them. Unless they are majoring in math/sciences (Williams has a 10% math major population, which is very high compared to the US average), or have already begun the pre-med track, the only clear avenues that aren't blocked off by their past decisions are consulting->MBA, and law school. Disclosure: I attended Williams. About 25% of students double major. I started off with a clear "1 major for me, 1 for life skills" path, and intended to major in CS and Music. At the end of freshman year I realized I was an exceedingly mediocre composer, and switched my second to Economics (if that seems like a cynical career move, at the time I thought economics was the path to becoming Hari Seldon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asimov-economics http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asi...)