So based on campus visit and vibe, after visiting many campuses, our DC, a reasonable Ivy contender from a DMV magnet school - chose Brown for ED.

Hotter than a pistol. Annoying strivers target the top 10 and Northwestern, hip smart kids want Brown.

^The reputation that Brown is the easy, granola head ivy where scions of celebrities go still holds for some reason.

I think the grade inflation, the perceived lack of rigor, open curriculum, ultra-liberal reputation and the lack of research strength of the school add to this.

Anonymous wrote:I think the argument that there’s no department in the top 10 is silly, too, but for a slightly different reason. Having strong, but maybe not tippy-top, departments across the board is more enriching to the undergrad experience than excelling in a single department or two. While CalTech and Juliard excel in STEM and music, respectively, and both are incredibly hard to get into, neither provides the broad-based “universal” education that’s available at other “universities” like Brown.

I have to disagree with you that there’s no difference in development cases, though. Where Brown is different is in the push to attract celeb kids in particular. Sure, Harvard took the Kushners, and there’s no way anybody could defend that, but the Kushners are relative unknowns and the impetus seems to have been their money. Plus Harvard wasn’t waving flags saying, hey, we’ll make it easy for you by not requiring heavy-duty cores or STEM distributional requirements. There’s a lingering snobbery about how JFK, Jr, one of Brown’s first famous kids, ended up at Brown because he wasn’t going to make it at Harvard.

I don't think any teens know or care about JFK Jr, let alone where he went to college 30 years ago. A lot has changed in the last few decades. Two rich party girls we know just graduated from Brown — they're now in medical school.

Brown offering free tuition to up to 50 students from U of Puerto Rico — this just improved my opinion of the institution.

http://thehill.com/latino/357165-brown-offers-tuition-free-enrollment-to-displaced-students-from-university-of-puerto

Parent of a Brown student here. We have been delighted with Brown and with the educational experience our kid has been getting - classes are rigorous and good. It is NOT a cakewalk -- my kid is actually quite stressed out this week with midterms and papers! But also, he is so happy and engaged. Yesterday, he was telling me about "a really good discussion" he had in one of his classes.

In terms of the kids there, I was just visiting for Family Weekend and the place does not smack of wacky leftists. It seems like a pretty normal school. I would say the jock/bro population of males is a little light, but other than than that, it seems like the student population in the other colleges I've visited over the years during my kids' various high school visits. Most of the Brown kids are clean cut and hipster/preppy and/or nerdy - but not really what I'd describe as "quirky." One has to look pretty hard to find a kid with dyed hair and piercings.

To me, Brown shines for its caring environment and intellectual vibe - people are really intensely into whatever it is that they are studying. While I visited, I met kids concentrating in 1) economics (kid, a senior, was interviewing at two of the big name consulting firms), 2) music and computers (interplay of the two, kid not yet sure what they want to do), 3) math/econometrics (kid wants to work at a hedge fund) 4) Middle Eastern studies (kid is planning to go to grad school in London), and 5) a pre-med kid studying public health. All of these kids were super nice and pleasant, and seemed to have their eye on the ball.

So I would say Brown is pretty normal, and to me, is a perfect place for an intense kid who is really passionate about learning and exploring intellectual interests. Also, the campus and surrounding area is gorgeous, and the Thayer Street/greater Providence food scene is great.

I think the argument that there’s no department in the top 10 is silly, too, but for a slightly different reason. Having strong, but maybe not tippy-top, departments across the board is more enriching to the undergrad experience than excelling in a single department or two. While CalTech and Juliard excel in STEM and music, respectively, and both are incredibly hard to get into, neither provides the broad-based “universal” education that’s available at other “universities” like Brown.

I have to disagree with you that there’s no difference in development cases, though. Where Brown is different is in the push to attract celeb kids in particular. Sure, Harvard took the Kushners, and there’s no way anybody could defend that, but the Kushners are relative unknowns and the impetus seems to have been their money. Plus Harvard wasn’t waving flags saying, hey, we’ll make it easy for you by not requiring heavy-duty cores or STEM distributional requirements. There’s a lingering snobbery about how JFK, Jr, one of Brown’s first famous kids, ended up at Brown because he wasn’t going to make it at Harvard.

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.

I think it's silly to say that Brown is finding it hard to compete. It's not the school for everyone, but then Harvard (or Dartmouth, or MIT etc) isn't either.