Should I choose Brown or Dartmouth for environmental studies?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Dartmouth places environmental study in a more outdoors-centered, field-accessible setting, while Brown offers more freedom to build an interdisciplinary environmental path within an open curriculum and a coastal New England city. Dartmouth’s Hanover location, its connection to the Dartmouth Outing Club, and access to nearby forests, rivers, and mountain environments make regular field-based involvement unusually easy. Brown’s Providence location supports a different kind of environmental work, including coastal, urban, public-health, policy, and community-focused questions.

At Brown, Environmental Studies is designed to cross disciplinary lines, so students can readily combine it with biology, geology, public policy, economics, international and public affairs, anthropology, or the arts. The Open Curriculum can be especially valuable for a student who wants to shape a distinctive concentration around climate justice, environmental policy, food systems, or marine and coastal issues without extensive general-education requirements.

Dartmouth’s Environmental Studies program has a more defined departmental home and benefits from a campus culture strongly oriented toward the outdoors. Its academic calendar can also make it practical to devote an off-term to a research project, internship, or field program. Students interested in ecology, conservation, environmental science, natural-resource questions, or learning through place-based field experiences may find the setting particularly compelling.

For environmental studies specifically, Dartmouth is the stronger choice when hands-on outdoor work and a nature-immersed campus are central to what you want from college. Brown is the better academic fit if you want maximum curricular flexibility and see your environmental interests connecting most strongly to policy, social justice, cities, coastal issues, or several fields at once.