Stanford vs Brown for physics undergrad?

Applying to College
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I think Providence does start to feel a little provincial eventually, but it’s a lovely city (I lived there for a few years). Lots of kids go to Boston for concerts etc. it’s an easy train ride away. And some go to New York occasionally. And Rhode Island has both good bus and train access if she is comfortable with that. There is an outing club that goes on regular adventures as well.

I personally think Stanford is more challenging to get off campus and do things, just because it is so spread out.

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22

This is all so helpful - really appreciate the candid insights! Although she is also excited by and applying to a couple of large state schools, she is a bit apprehensive about 500-student lecture halls and having a hard time getting classes. It sounds like generally this is not the case at Brown which is good to hear.

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23

Many nice things about Brown. But being able to walk to the Amtrak station (Boston, New Haven, New York, Philly, DC) makes any isolation/small city problem MUCH easier to manage.

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24

It is also only like 30 minutes from a beach! Or 45 minutes from an actual ocean beach. Also has ferries.

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I LOVE ferries!! I know there’s one to Block Island and I think there is also one to Martha’s Vineyard from a town that’s not too far away.

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Totally!!

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Me too! I am a huge fan of getting out on the water, so to me the ferry itself is already part of the adventure.

For whatever reason, I think sometimes some prospective students just sorta forget historic cities like Providence are coastal towns, that indeed they exist because they were important ports going all the way back to the colonial era. But if you are into boats, beaches, islands, and so on, it is all right there!

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Brown is wonderful!

Since it is nearby, I hope you don’t mind if I bring Harvard into the discussion as another possibility. My physics freshman is really enjoying her courses, classmates, professors. They have a lovely, fun and highly-supportive community. A key benefit that factored into her matriculation decision and she expects to leverage as she progresses will be cross-registration for courses at MIT.

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Just helped my D move in at Stanford. So I may be a bit biased. Also we visited Brown a year and half ago and my D didn’t like the vibe there. So the vibe is very subjective. Stanford prides itself in its Liberal arts curriculum and has numerous opportunities for research in every field. Also a lot of courses at Stanford are interdisciplinary and the faculty hold dual departmental positions. As @gardenstategal mentioned they have the SLAC where students from other schools go to conduct their research as well. In terms of resources and opportunities you cant go wrong with Stanford. I would advise not to go with interaction with one professor but looks at the overall pros and cons in an objective manner. Also to me it seems like you are proud of the Bay Area where Stanford is located.

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30

A little off topic, but have you been to the Chesapeake bay bridge tunnel? Not a ferry, but totally amazing for (this) water lover.

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Congrats to your D on Stanford! Yes agreed - these are individual data points my DD is working with. I think she is looking hard at the programs at each school - TBH they are of course both fantastic - but also trying to cobble together a sense of which is her top since she can only ED/REA to one. What was the main reason your D chose Stanford?

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I can give you perspective from a Brown first year student. He was able to get all his first choice classes including a 20 person seminar class he was not assigned to due to demand. They allow kids a shopping period to trial classes. He showed up for the class and was added second week. It’s a really nice feature to explore. Sounded chaotic to me at first, but it does work out, and really encourages the exploration mindset that is in the dna of the place. It also makes for happy professors as they are teaching a room filled with kids that want to be there.

He had a meeting with a professor a few weeks in to talk about research, everyone has been very willing to take a meeting and help even being green.

So far friends have taken bus to Newport which is super close, students ride for free across the state. Students take trains to Boston regularly and elsewhere. The campus is very easy to navigate, it’s a walk down College Hill to train station. Providence is doing well and evolving, they have a great food and arts scene, water fire festivals, etc. He loved that if felt like a cozy campus with accessible downtown which is also accessible to other larger cities.

Loved the vibe immediately on first visit. First time there was a petting farm on the main green, it was a very lively place both inside the student center and out. We sat and observed, lots of smiles, interaction, and just a general buzz around. I think the compactness of campus and student body that is attracted to Brown aids in this. It’s definitely collaborative, much less competition as everyone is doing their own path with open curriculum, and not as much direct comparison from student to student all taking the same classes. It’s by and large an intrinsically motivated student body and that also impacts the vibe in a very positive way for the right student fit.

Sorry for all the edits, kept thinking of more to add.

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33

I’ve long thought that one important thing to consider when looking at the most selective private universities is: which among them put(s) the most energy behind – prioritize(s) – their undergrads?

And while I’m sure that the schools that are particularly grad-heavy – Harvard and Stanford come to mind immediately – have sufficient funds to provide an exceptional undergrad experience and great teaching… there remains the fact that those undergrads are fighting over professors’ time, and research opportunities, with a throng of grad students.

So it may be easier for a kid at Princeton (about 64% undergrad), Brown (about 70% undergrad), or Dartmouth (about 66% undergrad) to spend time with profs or gain access to research projects than their counterparts at Harvard (~34% undergrad) or Stanford (~43% undergrad).

In addition, aside from the practical implications (access to profs and research, chiefly), the proportion of undergrad/grad students must, to some degree, direct the priorities and culture of the school.

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Thank you - super helpful and congrats/good luck to your son at Brown!

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I’ve seen the opposite be true. Many research opportunities for undergraduates at highly selective institutions come from working on the project groups of grad students.

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You have to take this with caution and a lot of caveats, but I think this peer-survey-based ranking from US News is potentially interesting information on this subject:

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/undergraduate-teaching

As explained in the Methodology page:

In the spring and summer of 2023, U.S. News & World Report once again asked top academics to name the schools they believe have faculty with an unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching.

The rankings for Best Undergraduate Teaching, as part of the 2024 Best Colleges rankings, focus on schools whose faculty and administrators are committed to teaching undergraduate students in a high-quality manner. College presidents, provosts and admissions deans who participated in the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey were asked to nominate up to 15 schools in their Best Colleges ranking category that have strength in undergraduate teaching.

The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2023 peer assessment survey.

Then to sort of test your hypothesis (although the focus here is on teaching generally and not research specifically):

Brown is at #3, Princeton #4, and Dartmouth #5. The only colleges above are Elon (looks like around 89% undergrad) at #1, and Georgia State (looks like around 87%) at #2.

Then Stanford is in a tie at #24, Harvard in a bigger tie at #48.

This is not exactly proof, indeed I have not done anything else to try to detect a correlation between percent undergrad and these survey results (which I think would have to be controlled for other things to really be meaningful).

Still, kinda interesting to me your measure seemed to “predict” the different groupings of survey results (give or take) for those particular colleges.

Edit: Oh, by the way, in my view #24 or #48 are still good scores. Because there are way, way more colleges than that.

So I again want to stress that even taken at face value, this is not suggesting Stanford or Harvard would be bad choices. But it might–might–be another piece of evidence that if one of your priorities is “faculty with an unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching”, a place like Brown might be a particularly good choice, even among other still very good choices.

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One of the basic issues here is we don’t necessarily know the shape of the curve.

Like, one possibility is there is a linear relationship between percent undergrad and research opportunities (controlling for other factors), which plausibly could go either way (so 100% undergrad LACs could model out highest, or lowest, with it being up/down from there).

Another possibility is it is curved, and again it could go either way. So, maybe it peaks at around 65% (the above-identified zone), and it is lower on either side. Or maybe it is in a valley around 65%, and is higher on either side.

To my knowledge there is no measure of undergrad research opportunities we could use to even test these issues, not even imperfectly.

So personally, I tend to look instead to things like PhD feeder statistics, which are (somewhat) available, and which I think might serve as a reasonable proxy.

But if someone does not find that reasonable, I am not sure what else there is to be done to test different hypotheses about this issue.

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I think any metrics seeking to tie relative size of undergraduate program to “professorial engagement” (just for convenience- editing a professors book, fact-checking an article, etc. aren’t research per se, but involve heavy faculty engagement with a student) is going to fall apart. The key factor is THE STUDENT and not the size of the student body relative to the professor’s other commitments.

You can graduate from Swarthmore without having any professorial engagement. You can graduate from UIUC with multiple faculty mentors, two research projects, and a fully funded fellowship overseas which you got when your faculty mentors sat you down and said “we are nominating you for this”. Don’t get caught up in the fallacious narrative that professors at big research U’s only care about grad students, and that faculty at LAC’s only care about teaching. Neither of these things are true although folks on CC like to repeat them ad nauseum.

Not every professor is going to have the bandwidth to teach a freshman the practical skills required to be helpful on a research or publication team. Some will, some won’t. Some derive great satisfaction out of mentoring and some see it as a time consuming, low payoff activity. Not every undergrad has the drive and the skills to participate in something out of the classroom/seminar room. Some do, some would rather serve as social chair for their sorority or play Lacrosse.

Generalizing from campus to campus is not productive since it is so student specific/faculty specific.

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At least for me, I would completely agree the student is always one of the key factors. But I am less convinced that the student is always the only factor, and that institutional or departmental issues are complete non-factors in all cases.

For those of us who think institutional or departmental issues might be factors in some cases, the question then becomes how to get useful information about institutions or departments. Absent direct measures, this is going to turn into a search for various proxies. None of which may be all that reliable on their own, but perhaps you can look at a variety of plausible proxies and see if any colleges of interest seem to be standing out.

That at least is what I do. I look at all sorts of things–that US News peer survey (they also have one for LACs), as mentioned PhD feeder data, NCES data about the actual number of people who end up graduating with certain majors, and so on. I note when I am really interested in specific comparisons, I like to look at PhD counts normed to primary major counts.

But of course all this is based on the premise that institutional and departmental issues might at least sometimes be a factor in the educational experience of a given student, and others may not believe that is true.

Anyway, my two cents is for a person with a Physics interest, both Stanford and Brown look very good, but in some measures maybe Brown looks a little better. I am sure, therefore, that the student in this case will in fact be the primary factor in what happens, not the institutions or the departments in question. Nonetheless, IF the student is already a bit more feeling like Brown is a fit, this analysis would support just running with that feeling, since it doesn’t contradict it, and if anything mildly supports it.

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40

This is a great, concise summary - really appreciate your thoughtfulness!

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