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[quote=Anonymous]I have seen similar arguments made about Brown in the past on other forums I used to be involved on during my academic days and I've always found those arguments silly.

Arguing over whether a school has enough departments in the top ten versus another peer university is meaningless. If you are an undergraduate, it really is irrelevant whether the history department is ranked #1 or #15. If you are a graduate student, the school is irrelevant for it's only the department that matters, and even more than that, the specialities of that particular department. If you're interested in the American Civil War you'd pick the lower ranked department that is better known for Civil War history research than the overall higher ranked department.

But let's get back to the undergraduate perspective as this is a forum for parents with kids applying to college. Departmental rankings are based on the research output of the faculty, not the quality of undergraduate teaching. I started out at one of the A/W/S and after a year transferred to a top Ivy. I had my reasons for transferring, but to this day I still fully concede that the quality of instruction at the LAC was superior, in many cases, vastly superior, than the quality of instruction at the top Ivy despite that the top Ivy had prestigious departments and famous faculty. I took classes from major professors who regularly appeared in the NYTimes or talk shows or wrote books that hit best seller lists and they could still be terrible teachers. The best teaching and the best classroom experience I had were from professors you'd never heard of.

Even more so, as someone who's been through both undergraduate and graduate degrees at two major Ivy league schools, the role of the undergraduate in the department is minor. Graduate students get the bulk of attention. Most undergrads take the classes and some may have access to TA positions or research projects but you most likely are not going to be studying side by side with a Nobel winning professor on a research project. It can happen, in theory, but it would be so rare that for 99% of Ivy students it's not a realistic thing to aim for. You can take classes with a Nobel winning professor, he or she may actually be a quite decent teacher, but it really won't go much further than that.

Last but not least of all, from an instructional perspective, there is no difference between any of the Ivies.  You will get a great education at all these schools. You will have great professors at all these schools. You will have dud professors. You will be surrounded by bright students. As for money, yes, Brown doesn't have the endowment of Harvard, but for most students that's pointless. Brown is still very rich. It's only poor relative to Harvard (actually, I believe some LACs have higher per capita endowments than even Harvard, but feel free to correct me). Brown has no distribution requirements? Not quite true, the majors themselves will have distribution requirements. But so what? When I was applying to college and later applying as a transfer student, I did look into Brown and this topic came up and in both cases the admissions representative was clear in saying that despite the lack of distribution requirements, the vast majority of Brown students still took a broad enough range of classes that would meet the distribution requirements of the other Ivy schools. Apparently Brown looked into this themselves at one point when they were contemplating returning to a distribution system and decided against it for this reason. I'd also like to point out that in the UK, including at Oxford and Cambridge, students study only their majors. If you are studying history, that is the only subject you study. You do not study math or science. And vice versa. There is nothing wrong with the Brown curriculum approach. It's just different and is not indicative of a lack of quality.

If you want to criticize Brown for recruiting offspring of famous people, well, the dirty secret is that all the Ivies do this. Brown is hardly alone. And do I need to remind people that the Kushners bought their way into Harvard via multi-million dollar donation from their father, who had no previous connection to the place. All the top colleges except MIT/Caltech and the service academies will make room in their student body, perhaps .5-1% of the students, for these special cases. Rich, connected, powerful and influential. But it's meaningless to the rest of the 99% of the student body and should not be a factor in criticizing one college over another unless you want to criticize all of them. All the top colleges are in the money business in their own ways and I have my own issues with it but the idea you can single out Brown for these practices is silly. They are all guilty.

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