<p>so apparently Brown’s RD acceptance rate is around 8…this is lower than princeton’s and almost as low as harvard’s.</p>
<p>WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? can someone explain this? I always had the impression that brown was not nearly as competitive as the top ivies (HYP, columbia, penn)</p>
<p>This year’s statistics are not in yet for RD. Last year it was a little over 10%, according to the March 31, 2009 edition of the Brown Daily Herald:
[The</a> Brown Daily Herald - Brown admits 10.8% in most selective year ever](<a href=“http://www.browndailyherald.com/campus-news/brown-admits-10-8-in-most-selective-year-ever-1.1667412]The”>http://www.browndailyherald.com/campus-news/brown-admits-10-8-in-most-selective-year-ever-1.1667412)</p>
<p>It may very well go down this year. Why are you so shocked?</p>
<p>Actually Penn and Cornell are the least competitive as far as Ivies go. Last year it was Harvard (7.3%), Yale (7.5), Columbia (9.8), Princeton (9.9), Brown (10.8), Dartmouth (12.0), Penn (17.1), Cornell (19.1)
So basically, the chances of getting into any Ivy are horrendously low. Good luck! :D</p>
<p>Since when did Penn become a “top Ivy” over Brown and Dartmouth. Its way less selective.</p>
<p>^less selective, but better.</p>
<p>In what way? Outside of USNEWS, it pretty much loses to Brown and Dartmouth in every way possible.</p>
<p>^explain please</p>
<p>i dont believe they can be “worse” i mean they are all great institutions with stengths in different areas. and acceptance rates of 20 is still very selective, over many institutions in theu.s.</p>
<p>Penn is as selective as Dartmouth, Columbia and Brown, PERIOD. Its SAT averages are the same, ACT averages the same or higher, and average class rank higher.</p>
<p>It has fewer applicants, so it has a slightly higher acceptance rate - but Brown, Dartmouth and Penn all had roughly the same acceptance rate just 3 years ago.</p>
<p>Don’t get ahead of yourself there, admitone. Penn’s applications have already increased significantly this year, and that’s just for the ED round. We will catch up soon enough.</p>
<p>Brown has been increasingly more difficult to get into and has generally outpaced its peers in the last 5 years in growth. These things have a tendency to ebb and flow a bit, however, we’ve recently made a few moves which will permanently help Brown access applicant pools we simply didn’t before. I’m not sure to what extent our peers, other than HYP, are already accessing these same groups so it’s hard to say whether we’re doing a better job marketing or we’re actually just catching up to where we should have been.</p>
<p>Right now, Brown is hot and desirable for whatever reason. That could change pretty quickly when we’re talking numbers as close as the Ivies are to each other.</p>
<p>muerte, you may also be getting ahead of yourself. Penn’s ED applications may be up this year, but what about last? Admitone was just expressing an opinion. I think these defensive contests based on “mine is better” aren’t very productive, but I don’t mind participating as long as we all focus on the discourse.</p>
<p>modest, I agree about the ebbs and flows surrounding the issues of selectivity, prestige, excellence, etc. It strikes me that all of the schools subject to these discussions (including fine schools like the University of Michigan, Emory, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis) face these ebbs and flows.</p>
<p>^true story. only ones that dont “ebb and flow” are HYP :D</p>
<p>To be honest though, pbr, some of these ebbs and flows are not natural at all. For example WUStL has done a TON of work with admissions that has had a huge impact which suggests that their growth potential is much lower than some other places right now. Communications technology, a changing economy, and demographics have all shifted dramatically in the last few years, probably for good, which really reshuffled things recently.</p>
<p>So I think where schools settle out in about 3 more years is going to be pretty near “permanent” (will stay relatively similar for probably 25-50 years unless there is another major shift that I can’t foresee right now).</p>
<p>I think that we’re going to end up with probably about 10 schools below 10% and a bunch more schools in the 10-20% range that are going to be fixed in these ranges for some time with some variations from within those ranges based on these ebbs and flows when all is said and done.</p>
<p>I agree, modest, about the settling in that may occur. One wild card probably will be the strength and stability of the respective endowments. A random billion dollar endowment will help, as will prescience on the part of those managing the endowment. Another wild card will be the “health” (however defined) of the community in which the institution is located. Providence, for example, is a MUCH more attractive community now than it was when I was in school on the eastern seaboard in the late '70s (as are Philadelphia, New York, New Haven and other east coast cities). Endowment, however, will become increasingly critical. Princeton’s endowment, I believe, has helped it buoy above places like Brown, Penn, etc., notwithstanding other factors that may make it less attractive.</p>
<p>Interesting points, modest. No one really knows the key to college admissions and increasing applicant pool size, although plenty of people claim to have personally effected vast growth. For example, Eric Furda - erstwhile dean of admissions at Columbia, and now the current dean at Penn - is purported to have singlehandedly halved Columbia’s acceptance rate in the late 90s. He introduced a number of technological “streamlines” and trumpeted Columbia’s New York location. Of course, dropping crime rates may also have been just as important, if not more so, in attracting new students.</p>
<p>He started at Penn last year, and he’s trying to do the same thing. They recently started emailing high school sophomores (overkill, I think) and set up a special off-domain website for prospectives. Since our endowment did relatively “well” compared to all the other Ivies, Penn also just started offering free tuition to any family who makes $90k or less - I’m pretty sure that’s second only to Harvard and Yale, although I’m not certain.</p>
<p>Brown and WashU have made similar efforts, but as modest says - only a handful of schools have the potential to vastly grow their applicant pools. Penn and Brown, as two of the oldest and most prestigious schools in the country, obviously have a lot more weight than WashU. Brown has already made significant headway, and presumably Penn will also start to make more serious strides very soon. With rankings/prestige, it’s not very hard to make your case to naive high school sophomores.</p>
<p>With all due respect to Eric Furda, I suspect much of his success at Columbia had more to do with New York’s post-9/11 psychic growth, the economic success of the city, Guilliani/Bloomberg, and New York’s ever-increasing in-your-face media presence (which is very important to young folks), as well as a dropping crime rate, rather than admissions gaming at Columbia.</p>
<p>I respect Penn’s, and other top universities’, decisions to expand financial aid. To be brutally honest, however, I believe schools like Brown, Columbia, Penn, et al. have expanded their aid policies not due to endowment wealth, but rather due to the need to keep up with the Jones’s (Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford), who have much larger endowments and have been able to drive the train. Penn’s endowment may or may not have done “relatively well,” but it’s still relatively small compared to the big four.</p>
<p>Not being brutally honest at all - that’s of course precisely the reason that those schools had to up the ante with their financial aid.</p>
<p>And yes - I agree that a great deal of Furda’s success was actually New York’s, but I’m sure that a substantial part did in some connect back to his marketing campaign, specifically through the use of the internet and other networking technology.</p>
<p>You may not have an accurate picture of Penn’s and Columbia’s endowments, though - they’re 6 billion each, which is more than enough to keep up with Stanford, Harvard, et al. Certainly significantly smaller than each of those schools, but still more than adequate to cover tuition expenses for needy students - especially if that’s built into fundraising (and I know it is at Penn). And still among the 10 largest in the country.</p>
<p>I’d like to know why a school’s acceptance rate matters. There is no connection between the acceptance rate (on the scale we are discussing) and the quality of the education you will be getting. Does anybody really believe that because Yale’s acceptance rate is 7.5% and Dartmouth is 12% that Dartmouth is a “worse” school for it? </p>
<p>Frankly, I fervently wish 15,000 fewer people would apply to Brown, so more people who really want to go get in and fewer people are rejected and everyone is happier. If this suddenly happened and Brown’s acceptance rate rose to 15-20%, which is where it was just a decade or so ago – would Brown suddenly become a poor quality school?</p>
<p>One of the most encouraging things to me is that people who don’t come to Brown (who are admitted) tend to do go elsewhere because they perceive it as lacking academic rigor. Those who do come to Brown universally cite the open curriculum as the main motivating factor.</p>
<p>So right now, if not at the admissions level, it appears that yield takes care of sucking in only people who really want to be here. If that’s the case, I don’t care where the admit rate is. As long as 1400-1500 fantastic students apply to Brown who want to be here and will choose to be here, nothing else matters.</p>
<p>@modest- DOES brown lack academic rigor? because I got that impression too</p>
<p>
no, but yale is indisputably better than dartmouth ;)</p>