<p>Anybody know?</p>
<p>Thats a tough one. Both are very well known for good social life.</p>
<p>They have differant social lifes. The big differance is that D-mouth is very contained and isolated. There is no "off campus", so, its not like at Stanford where you can just take the train in to San Fran and have good time.</p>
<p>Stanford has no social life unless you want to drive 45 min north to San Francisco or 30 min south to San Jose. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never lived in this area. You're basically surrounded by millionaires. Palo Alto is not a college town.</p>
<p>I'm surprised you say that bcp05. Most Stanford kids I've talked to think there's good campus life.</p>
<p>Honestly? It's hard to say.</p>
<p>Stanford has that laid-back, California style, "fun in the sun" beachy atmosphere. It has a ridiculous majority of California students. All of the students I know there though, seem to be the type that pretend like they're all laid-back and casual, but kind of secretly study 20 hours for a physics test. Palo Alto is a cute, but not amazing place to hang out.</p>
<p>At Dartmouth, most students are also fairly laid-back, but D students are less anxious about being branded a "whiner" in terms of workload. Lots of alcohol and lots of frat parties- it's definitely not the place for an urban sophisticate scene. But Montreal and Boston are reasonable, and it's a lot of fun if you like doing things like bonding over a ski trip vs. in a coffee shop.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it comes down to East Coast vs West Coast, rural vs urban settings. Which one do you prefer?</p>
<p>Personally, I prefer Dartmouth's :D</p>
<p>As someone who has been to a few Stanford parties (and a Dartmouth one, at Chi Hereot), I've got to cast my vote for Dartmouth. I'm probably a little biased because I'm a Cal fan (and I'm ED dmouth 09). The main thing is to know what kind of a place you want. Stanford has frats too, but they study Sunday - Thursday, and then study until 8 on Friday and Saturday and then go to the frats. The campus life isn't the same quality as Dartmouth's, and from someone who knows Palo Alto well, you should know that it is definitely not a college town like Berkeley. It has a few good places to eat that aren't exorbitant, but other than that it's mostly for the adults. San Francisco is about 30 minutes north by car, or a lot more if theres traffic on 280. There's an incredible amount of stuff to do in SF all the time, so you probably won't get bored. You might get bored of driving up there all the time though. As for the train, I don't think that the Caltrain runs that late at night, and I don't know about bus service. With Dartmouth, there's definitely a more on-campus social scene, as Hanover only has 2 bars and the closest decent sized town is Burlington VT at 50 minutes away by car and Boston is about 90 minutes. The frats at Dartmouth are definitely a bigger deal than Stanford, and it looks like from what I saw when I stayed there for a weekend that they are the main suppliers for social stuff there. Maybe a current student could say some more stuff.</p>