Going to Brown as a townie doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck in Providence for the rest of your life, and you’d meet lots of really interesting people from around the country and world. FWIW, my Brown freshman roommate was a townie who also had grown up a block or so from campus and she really enjoyed it, as did her siblings who attended Brown (tuition-free, since their father was a professor). She and her siblings left Providence after college, but her daughter graduated from Brown this past spring,