Does Brown or Williams offer more seminar-style classes for undergraduates?

Williams is more likely to make seminar-style learning a regular part of your undergraduate experience. Its small liberal-arts-college scale means many courses, especially beyond the introductory level, are built around discussion, close reading, writing, and direct faculty feedback rather than large lectures. Williams also has its distinctive tutorial program, in which two students work closely with a professor and alternate writing papers and critiquing one another’s work.

Brown offers plenty of excellent seminars, including small first-year seminars and advanced, discussion-based courses within its open curriculum. But Brown is a much larger research university, so students are more likely to encounter lecture courses, particularly in popular introductory subjects such as economics, psychology, computer science, and the natural sciences. Small seminars are available, but students may need to be more intentional about selecting them as they move through their concentration.

Brown fits a student who values discussion-based classes but also wants the breadth, course variety, research opportunities, and student independence of a larger university. Its open curriculum can make it easier to build a seminar-heavy schedule, but it does not make the overall academic environment as uniformly small-scale as Williams.