<p>Since I contributed some stories of ancient regrets to the parallel Yale thread, I’ll chime in here, although my one story is really non-responsive.</p>
<p>My sister was an undergraduate at Stanford when I was in grad school there. She did NOT get good advising, at all, and wound up having to take an extra semester to complete her major requirements. (That was just the insult to injury; really she had hardly any adult input at all.) In general, her undergraduate education was shockingly mediocre, in part because she drifted around taking introductory courses, and in part because she didn’t realize that all the people who seemed so laid back were actually working behind closed doors, but not talking about it.</p>
<p>Did she regret going to Stanford? Not for a minute. She loved it. With one two-year gap in London, she’s lived in San Francisco since she graduated. Her college social network extended well into her 40s, and although she’s less close to her college friends now than she was 10 years ago, everything in her life really grew organically out of her college friendships. Even her (very well compensated) career stemmed from stuff she began in that 9th semester she had to take. So, really, it was all good. Just not so much educationally.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t even say anything about it, except that two years ago I went to a Stanford information session featuring a bunch of current students and recent grads. Someone else, not I, asked if the advising had gotten better, because historically it had been weak. They all looked at one another, and (politely) agreed that, no, it still sucked, but that didn’t matter because everyone was so smart and well-motivated.</p>
<p>Stanford back then (the 80s) was heaven for a self-starting undergraduate. It was a a great university without a great intellectual culture among the undergraduates, so basically anyone who was proactive at all about it could get all the faculty attention he or she wanted. But nothing encouraged students to do that; they had to choose that for themselves. I think that has changed a lot, though. At that time, no one would have taken seriously the proposition that Stanford was the equivalent of Harvard or Yale for undergraduates (socially, maybe, on the West Coast, but not intellectually). It also had lots of engineers – for whom it was great, of course, but most of them were a little disdainful of any activity that didn’t involve building something or drinking, or preferably both at the same time.</p>