system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I want to teach at a liberal arts college. How much does prestige of grad school matter?

I'm getting my PhD in chemistry, and I hope to become a professor at a liberal arts college. I have been accepted to three schools. One is top tier, one is mid tier, and one is bottom tier. (All three are RU/VH.) I'm having a hard time with the decision, and I need some insight. 

- I want to be close to family:
Bottom tier school is 30 minutes away. It's in my home state. I would be happy to teach at some of the schools in my home state.

- Research is not the most important thing in my life:
I am not a workaholic. I will not stay awake thinking about my work until the wee hours in the morning. The top tier school is a pressure cooker, and I'm more likely to have mental health issues if I go there. Mid tier is slightly more laid back, but it's still grad school. 5th year grad students at the bottom tier school said that 40-50 hours a week is the norm. It is a very relaxed department.

- I want to like the research at least a little:
Top school is amazing. Everything is awesome. Funding and resources are not even a little bit of an issue. 
Mid school has cool stuff happening. I would be happy doing that work.
Bottom tier school has only one professor I would want to work for, and even that research wasn't that exciting to me.

**tl;dr** I would go to a bottom tier school if I could be guaranteed the job I want at a liberal arts college. Leaving my family makes me sad, but I feel I may have no choice for the sake of my career.

Any words of wisdom?

**Edit:** I chose the top tier school. It was the right decision.
gpt
Like any tenure-track position, jobs at teaching-focused liberal arts schools are fiercely competitive. You seem to be under the impression that you can lowball grad school and slide into a teaching position. That isn't going to happen: if you can't publish, you won't get a job. So, you need to be thinking very seriously about what your publishing prospects look like at the mid- and bottom-tier programs. If you lack resources or talented advisors at either school, it's not an option.

You will also need teaching experience in grad school, so consider which schools would allow you to TA and (ideally) be the instructor of record of a course at some point.