<p>Don’t get me wrong, Brandeis is a great school (I’m seriously looking into one of their grad programs myself) and I know people who had great experiences there. Some people will do better at a smaller school with more hand-holding, and that’s fine. For some people a bigger school means more opportunities and greater variety while a smaller school is stifling and limiting, and for others a larger school is overwhelming while a smaller school is more comfortable–it’s all in what type of experience you’re looking for. But in terms of educational quality, intellectual environment, creativity and peers, Brandeis isn’t at all the clear winner some people are making it out to be. An “exciting intellectual and creative environment inside and outside the classroom” is a phrase that describes Stony Brook well too.</p>
<p>I didn’t say Brandeis wasn’t diverse, but the level of diversity at Stony Brook is hard to match, and very few schools (especially private schools) can compete on that front. The wide variety of people I’ve had as classmates at SBU has been a huge asset to my education. When you’re a “majority minority” campus, it’s a lot less likely for non-white students’ perspectives to be marginalized, glossed over, or tokenized. A non-traditional-aged student who raised two kids and a first-generation college student who grew up on food stamps will add important perspectives to a sociology class on family structures or that you can’t get from a textbook–and Stony Brook has a critical mass of those kinds of perspectives such that one person’s point of view won’t be taken as representative of their whole demographic. It’s not that Brandeis is a monoculture, but that Stony Brook’s diversity is unusually impressive. My point about course offerings was similarly intended–it’s not that Brandeis’s are inadequate or that they don’t have many strong departments, but rather that a wider course selection is a significant benefit of going to Stony Brook. I singled out “Hebrew, Judaic Studies and the Middle East” because those are areas where Brandeis has a special expertise and a far superior course selection to Stony Brook (and I say that as someone interested in Hebrew, Judaic Studies, and the Middle East), while in most other fields Stony Brook will offer many more options in a given semester.</p>