Does Notre Dame or Colgate have a stronger liberal arts feel?

The biggest practical tradeoff is scale: Colgate is a much smaller university built around an undergraduate-focused, intimate academic experience, while Notre Dame offers more of a mid-sized national university atmosphere with stronger school-wide traditions and a broader institutional presence. If what you mean by “liberal arts feel” is small classes, easy access to professors, and a campus where undergraduates are clearly the center of academic life, Colgate usually feels more like the classic liberal arts version of that experience. Notre Dame can still be personal, but it does not read as purely liberal-arts in the same way.

Colgate’s size and structure matter here. It is known for seminar-style discussion, close faculty contact, and an academic culture where students are very visible as individuals. Because it is smaller and almost entirely undergraduate-focused, the classroom experience tends to feel more direct and less layered by large-school complexity.

Notre Dame has many strengths that overlap with what students like about liberal arts colleges, especially strong teaching, a residential campus, and a real sense of intellectual community. But it still feels more like a full university than a liberal arts college. The presence of multiple colleges and schools, major research activity, and a larger student body changes the texture of academic life, even though many students still build strong professor relationships.

Campus culture also pushes the two in different directions. Notre Dame’s identity is unusually shaped by tradition, athletics, residential life, and its Catholic mission, so the overall feel is broader than just the classroom. Colgate’s identity tends to come across as more centered on the undergraduate academic and residential experience itself.

So on the specific question of which has the stronger liberal arts feel overall, Colgate is the clearer answer. Notre Dame is personal for a university, but Colgate more closely matches the small-scale, professor-connected, academically intimate environment most people mean when they say “true liberal arts feel.”