Does Notre Dame feel like a liberal arts college compared with Williams?

The biggest practical tradeoff is scale: Williams is built around the intimate liberal arts college model, while Notre Dame is a midsize research university that tries hard to preserve a close residential community. Williams will feel more consistently small, discussion-based, and professor-centered across campus life. Notre Dame can absolutely feel personal, especially through its residential hall system and strong undergraduate focus, but it still feels more like a university than Williams does.

Williams has the classic liberal arts atmosphere in a very direct way. The school is small, classes are often discussion-heavy, and the tutorial format in some courses is one of the clearest examples of that close-reading, high-participation style. Student life is also shaped by the fact that almost everyone is an undergraduate, so the academic and social environment revolves around undergrads in a way that is hard for a university to fully replicate.

Notre Dame is more undergraduate-focused than many universities, which is why some students are surprised by how personal it can feel. Professors are accessible, many classes are still reasonably small, and the residential hall system creates a strong sense of belonging that can make the campus feel tight-knit rather than anonymous. But the overall structure still includes more of what people associate with a university: broader offerings, more visible school spirit around big athletics, and a somewhat less uniformly intimate classroom culture than at Williams.

So yes, Notre Dame can give you parts of the liberal arts college experience, especially if what you care about most is community and professor access. But if you are specifically chasing the classic liberal arts college feel, Williams is much closer to that ideal in everyday academic life. Notre Dame feels like a university that is unusually good at creating closeness, not like a liberal arts college in disguise.