Brown vs. Swarthmore

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I know I know I know that there have been threads on comparing these two colleges before, but after reading them I still feel like I haven't gotten an answer.</p>

<p>I'm torn between applying to these two colleges. More specifically, which one to ED to, if at all. I'll be applying as an international student, and aid is a REALLY important factor. I'm looking for anywhere from 80-90%. The more the better. </p>

<p>I haven't ever visited either of these colleges, so I'm looking for a way to figure out what each campus is like. What are the students like from each college? From what I have heard, Swarthmore is a nerdy school. I'm a bit of a nerd myself, so that's not all that bad. If nerdy means that they put a lot of academic pressure on you, then I think I can handle it. If nerdy means the students are antisocial and COMPLETELY absorbed in their academic lives, I think I'll have a problem. I want a complete college experience, and social life is a huge part of that. Brown, on the other hand, seems to have the reputation of being more laid back. The drawback, of course, is that it's bigger than Swarthmore. Is the intimacy of classes/professors lost in Brown as compared to Swarthmore? Is there really that much of a difference between the courses you can take at one or the other?</p>

<p>With regards to location, I've heard Providence is more lively than Swarthmore. However, Providence is 50 minutes away from Boston, while Swarthmore is only 25 minutes from Phillie. How much of a factor is this? I never really partied alot in high school, and I want to have a chance to experience that side of life too. I also love studying, so long as it's something where I'm learning new and interesting things.</p>

<p>I know it sounds vain, but what about the dating scene at both places? Are people more into serious relationships, or is casual dating the norm? Is the student population more conservative at one college and more liberal at the other? I DO enjoy chilling out, and I would love to be able to go through the school year without a HUGE workload. This however is not such a big deal, as long I can have a balanced social life. </p>

<p>Academically, I'd consider them to be pretty much the same, save for Brown's open curriculum. Socially, I'm a little more clueless. Help in any area will be GREATLY appreciated.</p>

<p>Thanks :)</p>

<p>tonnyman</p>

2

<p>

It doesn’t. </p>

<p>[Swarthmore</a> College | Student Life](<a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/x7564.xml]Swarthmore”>Campus Life :: Swarthmore College)</p>

<p>

You’ll find that the majority of students at any college are primarily into casual dating and/or hook-ups.</p>

3

<p>they have the same undergraduate teaching standard I guess…so i’d go with Brown because it’s an ivy league member school.</p>

4

<p>IBclass06, I wasn’t trying to imply that. Was just asking if someone could clarify what people say when they say that Swatties are nerdy (and I just say that because I’ve read it on this website and others). No offense intended :slight_smile:
As for the dating, that’s good to know.</p>

<p>RML, reputation isn’t as important a factor to me as is the experience that I take home from the 4 years that I spend there. Of course, it counts, but between Brown and Swarthmore, I’m willing to disregard it.</p>

5

<p>Swarthmore is the epitome of the small, suburban, residential college. Brown is much more urban. </p>

<p>At Swarthmore, the student residences are pretty separate from the academic buildings, there are no cars and you can often hear a pin drop walking around the main campus late at night. That fact alone probably goes a long way in explaining why Swarthmore has the reputation it does for being studious and nerdy. </p>

<p>At Brown, the students live in quadrangles distributed pretty much along the city street grid and you can hear traffic, people on foot, and the occasional police siren far into the night. The fact is, there are many more nerds at Brown than at Swarthmore, but, their nerdiness is camouflaged by the general buzz of a busy state capital.</p>

<p>At Swarthmore you are very likely to recognize every student by sight within weeks of orientation.</p>

<p>At Brown, it will take you years just to figure out who ISN’T a student and just passing through on their way to RISD. </p>

<p>Other than that, they are exactly the same.</p>

6

<p>I’ve seen many threads comparing Brown and Amherst, but never Brown and Swarthmore.</p>

<p>Just to let you know: Swarthmore limits the number of incoming students receiving need-based aid to 20. There were 28 international students admitted to the class of 2013 this past year. This means 8 internationals are paying full freight and 20 are receiving mediocre financial aid, since the college only has 2 million dollars to divide among 107 international students annually.</p>

<p>[Swarthmore</a> College :: Financial Aid :: Frequently Asked Questions: <br>For Foreign National Students](<a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/x17673.xml]Swarthmore”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/x17673.xml)</p>

<p>Brown has a reputation for being the place to be for wealthy international students, celebrities, sons of foreign executives and government leaders. I can’t use numbers to support this generalization. However, you can expect a better award from Brown, as a needy international.</p>

<p>Brown will give you the more typical college experience, but both Providence and Philly aren’t exactly desirable cities. You can chill, but don’t expect to go out to the city every weekend, because if you’re a serious student, that’s not going to happen.</p>

<p>Brown’s Open Curriculum is a blessing if you’re intellectually curious and dislike being told what to learn.</p>

<p>Both schools are excellent, but for your family’s needs, Brown would be more generous.</p>

7

<p>Both are equally annoying.</p>

8

<p>Size does matter. My daughter visted Swarthmore and was turned off by how small the student population was and how many classes were so intimate. She felt that she wanted the ability to be slightly more anonymous and not have to be prepared for every class because there were only 8 students and a professor. Others may really like that. It’s a real difference between the Brown sized ivy and LACs. My daughter ended up applying to Brown ED. She thought Swarthmore’s campus was the more beautiful, but Brown’s is nice enough.</p>

9

<p>I would go with Brown</p>

10

<p>In addition to some of the campus characteristics johnwesley mentioned, another distinctive feature of Swarthmore is the relatively high percentage of natural science, CS, math and engineering majors there compared to some other top LACs (about 29%). In fact it is one of the only small liberal arts colleges with an engineering program. It offers majors in other academic areas that many LACs don’t, including Linguistics, Interpretation Theory, and Cognitive Science. Each year, external examiners are invited to Swarthmore to administer oral exams to students in the honors program (a practice usually associated only with doctoral programs). And it’s one of the top 5 schools in the country for the percentage of graduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s These characteristics probably all play into its reputation as such a nerdy, intellectual place.</p>

<p>Comment on the finaid situation: Without knowing the financial need of the average Swarthmore international student, I don’t understand how we can conclude that $2M necessarily results in mediocre financial aid to each of them. If anything, I would expect internationals to be more affluent than the average student. If so, $2M seems like a decent amount to spread among 80 kids; the other 27 presumably did find ways to pay without aid.</p>

11

<p>% international students receiving need-based aid
51% Swarthmore
32% Brown</p>

<p>Average aid package of International students receiving aid:
$41,551 Swarthmore
$37,019 Brown</p>

<p>Brown is four times the size of Swarthmore, but its international aid budget is only 2.7 time larger. On a per international student basis, Swarthmore’s international aid budget is nearly twice the size of Brown’s. Swarthmore meets full need of all enrolled students with loan-free aid packages, including international students. </p>

<p>The suggestion that Brown would likely offer more “generous” financial aid than Swarthmore or that Swarthmore’s aid packages to internationals are “mediocre” is not supported by the facts above, that are readily available in the common data sets. To the contrary of the assertions made in this thread, it actually appears that Brown is using “wealthy Saudi and celebrity” international students as a profit center. It takes a concerted admissions office effort to enroll 68% of your international students who can write a check for full-fare tuition. That does not happen by accident. Swarthmore has essentially the same percentage of full-fare internationals as they do US students – about 50-50 receiving need based aid in both groups.</p>

<p>Both Swarthmore and Brown are excellent schools. Swarthmore has considerably more financial resources on a per student basis (nearly 3 times the per student endowment), but Brown is four times larger. So the tradeoff is personalized attention, more interactive, and more boutique scale undergrad education at Swarthmore versus the wider variety of offerings and larger class environment at a large private university like Brown. There’s no one correct answer for every student.</p>

<p>The parent above is correct. If you want the anonymity of large classes, Swarthmore is not the place for you. It is a highly interactive and collaborative education. My daughter learned from a senior her first month there to always go to class with something prepared to discuss. It is very difficult to hide in classes for long at Swarthmore, so I would not recommend it unless being an active participant in class appeals to you. [NOTE: there are lecture format courses at Swarthmore. Most Swatties don’t take four courses a semester with 8 students, just like there are small seminar courses at Brown. These are differences of degree.]</p>

<p>I would suggest posting your question in the Swarthmore forum. There is one parent there who has had a son or daughter at both Brown and Swarthmore.</p>

12

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/776474-college-comparison-vii-class-sizes-classes-20-students.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/776474-college-comparison-vii-class-sizes-classes-20-students.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>70.6% , Brown
75.1% , Swarthmore</p>

<p>I’m not sure that this is a huge enough distinction between classes with <20 students to call Brown the place for “large impersonal” relationships and Swarthmore the bastion of small class experiences.</p>

<p>Brown is not using foreign students as a bank roll-- we’re simply not need-blind for internationals and currently cannot afford to be though we’re working toward it. Yes, you have less of a chance to get into Brown if you need money as an international student. This is not something hidden, it’s our admitted policy.</p>

13

<p>The 20 person class threshold is carefully selected by USNEWS to obscure differences in class sizes. The real differences are at the top end.</p>

<p>Brown has 41 courses with more than 100 students. Swarthmore has 1
Brown has 100 courses with more than 50 students. Swarthmore has 7,
Brown has 130 courses with more than 40 students. Swarthmore has 12.</p>

<p>This means that 12% of Brown’s courses are too big for any meaningful discussion (40+) versus only 3.3% of Swarthmore’s classes. Here are the numbers:</p>

<p>


          Swat        Brown<br>
  2 to 9    133 36.6%   344 31.6%
10 to 19    134 36.9%   426 39.1%
20 to 29    70  19.3%   134 12.3%
30 to 39    14  3.9%    56  5.1%
40 to 49    4   1.1%    30  2.8%
50 to 99    7   1.9%    59  5.4%
100 plus    1   0.3%    41  3.8%</p>

<p>total   363 100.0%  1090    100.0%

</p>

<p>Interestingly, Swarthmore not only has smaller classes, but more classes relative to the size of the student body. Brown has more than four times as many undergrades and thus should have over 1400 class sections instead of 1090. Swarthmore provides one class section for every 4 students. Brown provides one class section for every 6 students.</p>

<p>That gives an idea of how many students are in the large lecture classes. In a given fall semester, at least 4100 Brown students are in a class of 100 or more. That’s 2/3 of the student body. Another 4000+ are in a class between 40 and 100 students. At Swarthmore, 100 students (just 7% of the students) are in a class of 100 in a fall semester and only one third of the school is in even one class from 40 to 100. In other words, large lecture classes are the exception, not the rule. BTW, the 100 person class at Swat is Intro Bio with 112 students for the lectures. It has five lab sections, each taught by a Biology professor, not a TA.</p>

<p>Brown does not list subsection sizes where asked on the Common Data Set. Swarthmore lists 107 subsections (lab and discussion sections of large courses) as follows:</p>

<p>2-9 students: 51 subsections
10-19 students: 43 subsections
20-29 students: 12 subsections
30 -39 students: 1 subsection</p>

<p>Swarthmore does not count, for their Common Data Set submissions, the Directed Reading courses that are one student and one Professor exploring a topic of special interest to the student.</p>

<p>There are perfectly good arguments in favor of the large private research university. However, trying to claim that a large research university can match the boutique scale of education at arguably the most student-centered small liberal arts college in the country is, as they say back home, a dog that won’t hunt.</p>

<p>For example, Swarthmore brings to campus each May over 130 outside experts (including 3 Brown professors last May) to give one on one written and oral examinations to the 110 or so Honors candidates in the senior class. This is the kind of extremely labor intensive educational program that a large research university simply cannot match in their undergrad teaching. The cost is somewhere in the range of $2000 per honors student.</p>

<p>Swarthmore has an 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio. All undergraduate. Brown advertises an 8 to 1 ratio, too. However, the fine print in the Common Data Set shows that they are including the graduate schools in that calculation.</p>

14

<p>Brown’s more customizable, Swarthmore is more uniformly small/intimate. They’re both about equally good I’d say, but for different kinds of people. If taking any big classes whatsoever is a dealbreaker, go to Swarthmore. If you want near-total freedom to customize your education, and don’t mind the occasional large lecture, go to Brown.</p>

<p>I doubt that 4100+ Brown undergrads are in a 100+ person lecture in a given semester. Some people (pre-meds, freshmen taking mostly intro courses) take more than one 100+ person class a semester, some people (humanities majors, upperclassmen) might not take any at all. </p>

<p>With Brown’s open curriculum, it’s probably easier to shop around for small, intimate classes if you want them. Brown students also have 904 classes with fewer than 20 students, while Swarthmore students have 337 to choose from - impressive numbers for such a small school, but it just doesn’t have the same breadth, depth, and flexibility in its offerings as Brown does.</p>

15

<p>" Brown has 130 courses with more than 40 students. Swarthmore has 12."</p>

<p>can someone do this one:</p>

<p>The Brown University registrar’s office lists ___ courses being given at Brown University this semester.</p>

<p>The Swarthmore College registrar’s office lists _____ courses being given at Swarthmore College this semester.</p>

16

<p>

</p>

<p>I’m trying to get off of this site but this kind of comment I can’t let slide.</p>

<p>There are significantly more than 110 students in Brown’s class of 1600 or so that get honors (I think the number is about 450-550 students). Each one of those students is working one on one with a professor on original research work for at least the period of one year who’s a professor in residence who acts as a personal mentor and advisor. And that’s simply looking at the honors experience, which is far from the only one on one experience offered at Brown.</p>

<p>As ljbw mentions, Brown has almost 3 times the classes that are fewer than 10, and more than 3 times as many that are 10-20. Overall the share of courses on the books at less than 20 is nearly the same, giving you three times as many options to choose from at Brown for classes fewer than 20. Considering you create your schedule at Brown, short of introductory chemistry courses for science concentrators, the breadth of courses which offer the individual learning experience at Brown is simply superior and the options are at least as equally accessible. The opportunity to do individual research and work is at least as large, and I could use numbers to demonstrate it’s larger, at Brown. For instance, other than engineers, all science concentrators getting a bachelor’s of science MUST register for two semesters of research for credit, a one on one experience with a professor who actually has to produce high-level research and maintain a lab as a part of their job and produce Ph.D.s as well. That’s an experience we’re not trucking people in for.</p>

<p>I don’t think that Brown is better than Swarthmore and now I’m coming across a zealot for my own institution, but interesteddad, while I respect your knowledge, your analysis is way overstepping and presenting your biases openly.</p>

<p>As for subsections, there are sections for nearly all courses over 40 students which cannot exceed 20 students in that section. In my experience in the sciences, these sections were always led by professors or had a professor in the room.</p>

17

<p>

</p>

<p>Monydad:</p>

<p>I gave that information in the chart I posted above. It’s the college’s own data from their Common Data Set filings. The totals -** 363** class sections for 1395 on-campus students at Swarthmore and 1090 for 6095 students at Brown - are the actual numbers for the fall 2008 semester. Those are the class sections with 2 or more students registered last fall.</p>

<p>If you do the Registrar’s search for this semester’s offerings at Swarthmore, you get 884 listings, but that includes lab section, language drill section, plus all of the Directed Reading, Independent Study, and Senior Thesis courses that would not be counted in the Common Data Set data above.</p>

<p>BTW, for a very thorough discussion of how to evaluate a college curriculum, read Professor Tim Burke’s blog here:</p>

<p>[How</a> to Read a Curriculum Easily Distracted](<a href=“http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2009/08/20/how-to-read-a-curriculum/]How”>http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2009/08/20/how-to-read-a-curriculum/)</p>

<p>He participated on a panel for my daughter’s accepted students days and Swarthmore and his explored the topic “Who Should NOT go to a Small Liberal Arts College”.</p>

<p>He covers the same ground in this long blog, essentially describing who would be better off at Brown:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>He then follows up with long seven-point recommendation for how a student who is not so specifically-focused coming out of high school should evaluate a course catalog – that is way too detailed to even attempt to quote here.</p>

18

<p>

</p>

<p>OK. Here’s another way to look at it. There are 7000 undergrads at Brown, each taking four courses. So let’s call it 28000 student-courses, four per student. We know that at least 4100 are in classes with 100 students because there are 41 hundred-seat lecture courses. So that means that 15% of all student-courses at Brown last fall were in hundred-person lecture courses.</p>

<p>There were 1400 students at Swarthmore so 5600 student-courses (four per student). We know that 100 of these were in hundred-person courses. So, the percentage of Swarthmore’s student-courses in hundred person lectures was under 2% last fall.</p>

19

<p>I think it is hard for most people to guide you, because most people haven’t been to both these schools or have kids at both these schools for perspective. My daughter did apply to a few LAC’s (not Swat) but I see in hindsight they were more my pushing. I thought she would benefit from personal attention and mentorship and that she might be able to correct a habit of being overzealous and overcommitting then running into time management issues.</p>

<p>So she chose Brown, as you may have guessed. She really wanted a larger school in view of going to a small close knit HS (which she loved.) In hindsight she felt she was so right in choosing the larger school environment. She still maintained a pretty small circle of friends overall, but had lots to choose from, and she is a little picky. She was also happy to count many grad students as her friends even from freshman year, but that increased as she did her upper division. These have been long term great contacts for her around the country. She is more a hanging out with friends person, but went to parties from time to time, or threw smallish ones.</p>

<p>What I found was that she did get the personal attention and mentorship, but she is not one who is afraid to knock on professors doors and ask for it. She felt getting on a project was pretty much just asking. She had a research job or grant every summer. She did a 1-1/2 year research project school year as well. These were individual or team projects directly with prominent professors in the fields.</p>

<p>She went to Boston 2 or 3 times a semester and New York at least once a semester. Didn’t leave College Hill much otherwise, except to do some biking on the East Bay path toward Newport. Did attend some rock concerts/indie bands, most on campus, but some at local venue’s like Lupo’s since she did some intern work at WBRU and you can get free tix that way.</p>

<p>She never stopped overcommiting, but Brown’s flexibility made it easy on her, she didn’t have to pay for mistakes in overreaching. They want people to step over the comfort zone and to try interdisciplinary work. So they let you drop or withdraw quite late if something doesn’t work out, they let you pass/fail most anything (most don’t, she just used it for language and fiction workshop, I think.) The open ciriculum makes it easy to take a mix of harder or easier classes. But she, and lots of the other students, I think, just went all out and loaded up, often 5 classes a semester. If she could handle it fine, if not, drop one. I wished she wouldn’t do it, plus work/study, plus TAship, plus peer-advising, plus etc…but she has always been like that.</p>

<p>I’d guess it might be possible to take just easy stuff and have a relaxed college career there, but I never met anyone like that. It is a very self directed place, so you will be challenged to the extent that you choose to be. I’ve heard that some people, like celebrity kids get in with less qualifications. That’s a small set of peeps. When you get into your major, your academic circle will get much smaller and people will know who has the goods or not. Your classes will likely be small and you will work closely with your profs.</p>

<p>Bottom line is she was very happy and challenged at Brown. The relaxed lifestyle and collaborative atmosphere suited her well. She was accepted into a few PhD programs directly after undergrad and is going to UW-Madison where there is a top CS department and good Theory people who she is interested in studying with. It remains to be seen how much of a culture shock this will be. So far, so good.</p>

<p>Now, just find out how things went at Swat for someone who loved it. See if the basic things like small school vs medium school or open C vs. whatever swat has, suburban v small city matter to you much. Both will be fantastic education if you get in and get aid.</p>

<p>P.S. At Brown, and I think is typical of most colleges, people tend to hook up or to fall into an exclusive relationships, dating is usually done when you are older. (my daughter Does Not Hookup.) My daughter’s boyfriend of the last 2-1/2 years was overseas student with mucho financial aid.</p>

20

<p>“The totals - 363 class sections for 1395 on-campus students at Swarthmore and 1090 for 6095 students at Brown - are the actual numbers for the fall 2008 semester. Those are the class sections with 2 or more students registered last fall.”</p>

<p>My daughter got interested in a particular sub-area of her field at her LAC, and found that none of the (few) professors in her department were interested in it, and there were no courses. She also had to take a course she had no interest in to finish her major in her last semester, because there were so few offerings in the department that semester. Marite’s son had that same latter experience, at his different LAC. There were other instances along the way where she could not take certain courses she was interested in because of conflicts with another course that was only offered in one section.</p>

<p>These are some of the things that might happen less often at a university that offers 3x the number of courses/sections.</p>

<p>Swarthmore is actually better off than some other LACs since in a pinch a course can be taken at Penn et al, but the total elapsed travel time involved (round-trip, train + waiting + walking to Penn) would make this option significantly less attractive.</p>

<p>IMO, an undecided student is better off at an insitution that offers more, because later when that student sorts it all out there is a better chance that the university will actually cover, well, what it turns out the student now, as it turns out, actually wants to learn. There will be less chance that his/her emerging interests will be stunted by course limitations of the institution.</p>

<p>Before my daughter’s experience I too believed class size was the be-all and end-all, but I don’t any more. There are actual tradeoffs, and they can be real, she actually experienced them. Others as well (social limitations due to small size, classes that were actually too small, prof. knowing actually too much about you due to no TA, consequently putting your specific weak areas on exam…)</p>