For what it’s worth, I thought it looked great and would be thrilled if my son went there. (I do wonder if they’ll get their act together on engineering quickly enough but was absolutely unfazed by the architecture and places where thinks looked a little older/unkempt. I’m sure the dorms are awful but…dorms, right? As long as they are safe…)
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we visited Brandeis, and my D24 wasn’t impressed by the campus, but I thought that the school had by far the best presentation of anyone we saw - so much integration of undergrads into research, such great academic opportunities. I think it’s a gem! FWIW, I’m a professor at a SLAC with not great dorms/food and it doesn’t seem to be affecting our rankings or # of apps, both of which are surging.
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For context, we live in Berkeley near UCB and D26 has taken classes there… I think this is her mental model of a normal sized college / university. I think it’s possible that all LACs are going to feel very small to her in comparison 
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I love SLACs and attended one. I always thought my kids would attend them as well. But both of mine feel about them the same way yours does. They think it’s high school. And when I gushed around activities and bonding opportunities, they looked at me as if I attempted to put them in kindergarten. I was so heartbroken my older chose a large U, but having attended there for a year, I realize he made a right choice for him and no way he could have gotten access to type of coursework and clubs/research as he does at his current university. So my rose colored glasses for SLACs have finally been broken for STEM, but I still prefer them for liberal arts.
I also wonder if our kids being from CA and having so few SLACs around just see things differently than kids from the east coast where SLACa exist on every corner.
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I think for my D it was only partly the buildings - they do kind of look like her high school - but also the size. But that’s the beauty of so many options, something for everyone. FWIW, my D also hated Emory on sight (another one I had to force her to stay for the tour, lol), and just about everyone else I know loves the campus. She had very specific ideas about what she wanted, and neither of those was it.
I love Brandeis for its amazing academics. 
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One of the first tours we went on (daughter was recruited) was a tiny school. I knew pulling into the driveway (and it was the size of a driveway) that she’d never go there. Both kids (same age so starting college the same year but totally different academic styles) kept saying they wanted small schools even though they’d been to band camp at a big college and to other events like sports tournaments and theater camps. They’d been to fairly large high schools (1000, 3500, 1800 students; yes 3 high schools). I kept working on them and they both ended up at mid-sized schools, which by the end of 4 years both thought were too small. Gee, it’s almost like I knew what I was talking about with school size.
1200 students, even though it was a D1 school, was just too small. Plus it was in the middle of nowhere.
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A few LACs, although perhaps with less than 1/16 the undergraduate enrollment of UCB, nonetheless reside on spatial dimensions greater than UCB’s 1,232 acres. For an LAC to reach this spatial extent, however, the majority of its land may be in a natural form.
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I don’t think my D cares about acreage… her impression of Lewis & Clark’s physical campus size was based on the number, size, and purpose of the buildings that she saw during the tour (“here’s the science building,” etc).
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Academic fields such as geology, chemistry, physics and mathematics are liberal arts, of course.
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I tend to consider them STEM, but your point taken.
I think the harder thing to overcome than physical size for my daughter (and I was light years ahead of her on this) was the number of courses offered, and the number of professors in each department. Five in the physics dept., and not many more than that in bio or chem or math. She couldn’t have cared less that there weren’t many more in the English or history departments as she was planning to take the minimal number of courses in those. The course catalog many have listed 15-20 courses, but not all will be offered each year.
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It doesn’t help that the full term Liberal Arts and Sciences is often shorted to Liberal Arts!
But the classic liberal arts and sciences do in fact include the S and M in STEM. It is more the T and E which may be missing at an LA(and S)C, although these days many are at least doing CS. Engineering, though, remains relatively rare (although a few have it).
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I get it. I am saying for STEM portion I now don’t favor those schools as I used to. That’s it. But still think for social sciences non stem subjects, I would rather have my kid at SLACs. Personal preference based on our experience.
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If you look at LACs over time on a per-capita basis, their contributions to STEM rival the Ivy’s and well known research institutions in the country.
This article is a bit dated now, but it lists the 25 schools that are responsible for the greatest advances in science.
The second chart includes not only Swarthmore and Amherst (which compare favorably to the flagships and larger universities)… but on a per-capita basis schools like Haverford, Oberlin, and Reed join the list.
Whilst there may be fewer classes and a need for more planning for classes not offered every semester, the upside can be a more personal experience with a smaller group of incredibly talented professors.
I know personally the impact that a relationship with a professor can have on the trajectory of a child. There is one more STEM grad in the world right now because a professor took an interest in my kid, and refused to allow them to fail. It could not have happened at a large research university.
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No doubt, but I my kid is two courses short of having a degree as a rising sophomore given SLAC degree requirements. Where he is at, he can take grad school classes and the small class size isn’t limited to LACs. Upper divisions are all small and office hour make very intimate conversations. I have spent my entire life judging large universities and thinking they were lesser. Now that I have a kid attending, I see advantages I didn’t have as an SLAC graduate. All I am saying is small isn’t always better, which seems to be a default opinion on this board.
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For sure there is no one size fits all rule when it comes to colleges!
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I did everything I could to get S23 to look at smaller schools. Especially considering he was in a HS graduating class of <70. D22 couldn’t imagine being at a larger school, but for S23, there really was not other choice. He needed “more”. I thought it would take a lot to convince me, but once we went on tours I was blown away with how much a large university could offer. And that in most cases, you were still going to get a lot of personal attention.
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This is a very outdated thought. Might be somewhat accurate for large public universities for those students who are not members of the honors college, but definitely not accurate for the private research universities.
I read an interesting fact a few days ago shared by College Transitions:
48% of the classes at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois have nine (9) or fewer students and 78% of the classes have nineteen (19) or fewer students. Plus, Northwestern University’s total enrollment shows more graduate & professional (medical school and law school-- which are located on the gorgeous Chicago campus) students than undergraduate students; this creates a more serious academic learning environment than that found on most campuses in the country.
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Absolutely true. We are talking about people. Some people take an interest in you, others don’t.
It is perhaps less likely at a large research university, but it is certainly not impossible as EyeVeee suggests.
In my academic career, the teacher who took the most interest in me came from a large research U and I first had her in a large lecture hall. A chance conversation led to a mentorship and we are still in contact 30 years later.
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