I posted on another thread that I actually just got back from ateres. I read the post from WhyamIstillup, and I found a few mistakes… I don’t know you or what you want from seminary, but this is what I can tell you.
If you are looking for a lot of hashkafa, the places you will find that are Ateres and meohr, but very diffrent. The other seminaries of course have some hashkafa but not as much and do focus on text more. While Meohr and Ateres are both hashkafa based, Ateres is hashkafa that is from a source from text always, and is grounded not anything floaty or in the clouds, which is something I really enjoyed. Almost every subject had hashkafa brought out from it chumash, navi, everything! The reports were also that you had to use seforim and texts, but more mussar seforim, and the topic would be about Ahavas Hashem instead of let’s say the bigdei kehunah which was an example of a Bnos sarah report topic.
Bnos Sarah, Hadar, and BYA are def a little bit more academic. Machon Raaya is for one who is smart and intellectual and it’s a ton of work! Tiferes is known to be on the more yeshivish end of the BY seminaries, but is NOT academic. It does have some hashkafa also. It is hard to describe crowd, for some of these seminaries are extremely mixed! If you could maybe explain what you are looking to get out of your seminary year, what level of academics you want, and what crowd you would like to be with, I think I would be able to help you more after that. Also I don’t know where you live, but I hope you have a seminary adviser or a teacher that knows you who can help you with seminary stuff, for that will be most helpful. If you give me a little more info, I would love to help you further…!