BROWN GETS 28,000 APPLICATIONS - Analysis Thread

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
1

<p>I AM BUMPING TWO OTHER THREADS WITH CONFUSING TITLES TO THIS (hopefully) FORUM FOR ANALYSIS.
The quotes in my message, below, are taken from those other threads:</p>

<p>

Perhaps 9.5, but I suspect they pushed past 28,000 at the New Year and that’s why they extended the deadline by three days. I’m predicting 9.7 to 9.8.
Yes, I know … It’s an ass-backwards preoccupation, the acceptance rate. BUT AS COLUMBIA LEARNED in the late 1990s, when you break that single-digit barrier, the whiz-kid applicants take a fresh look at you, there’s a buzz, and BUZZ REAPS RESULTS in the applicant pool.

Your skepticism is well founded.
The admissions staff hasn’t grown in the period (2007 to 2009) that Brown’s application number has grown by perhaps 35 percent (21K to 28K-plus). And those 19 officers were already overworked in 2007.
Their new workload will of necessity mean that new procedures have been implemented, which we may call “triage.”
The old Brown approach – which made the admissions office the most famously idiosyncratic in the country – was the “diamonds in the rough” approach. Also known as the “Brown fit” approach. And that approach resulted in the most diversely creative student body in the country from roughly 1975 to 1998.

Exactly right.
The new “triage” procedure of an understaffed admissions committee involves short-shrifting the “diamonds in the rough” applicants. It instead imposes a “fast culling of the numerically measurable” approach, i.e. test scores and the like.
But this new “triage” nicely fits into the “US News driven” approach that Brown is desperately in need of, as it has seen its US News ranking plunge from 8th to 16th since the mid-1990s.
So everybody’s happy. Admissions officers employing the new “triage” can quickly cull the low-scoring apps and reduce the tall stack on their desk. And the Brown development office is happy because at long last Brown is pursuing the US News-driven strategy that worked so well for Columbia and Penn ten years ago.

It is indeed literally “superficial” but that’s the political reality on campus these days.
However, there’s an urgent new consideration that’s entered the calculation.
In the year 2040 the United States will be majority Hispanic, Asian, and black (in that order of proportionality). By 2055 the United States will be predominately a Hispanic country, with Spanish its core broadcast, electronic, and print language.
Also, by 2040 China and Indo-Asia will have larger world influence than the US (China by far, but Indo-Asia also).
Farsighted US universities are right now positioning themselves as pioneer solicitors of Hispanic, Chinese, and Indo-Asian communities.
(The losers in this trend are, as ever, the African-Americans, who will fare just as badly under a Hispano-Asian majority.)
Bottom line: Brown’s class of 2014 gets 9.8 acceptance rate, significantly higher standardized tests profile, more Hispanics and Asians, but also more rich Europeans.
And, to my satisfaction, more students from England (fallout from Watson), because, hey, that’s my ethnicity.</p>

2

<p>Will you start a fourth thread when it turns out that there were 26,000, or 30,000, or 28,752 applicants? </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Urban myth. I’ve done enough with admissions to know that this approach never really happened on a wide-scale basis.</p>

<p>The push to consider higher stats came from the faculty, by the way.</p>

3

<p>

</p>

<p>They definitely do read incomplete applications - which I found kinda weird (but fortunate!). I don’t know if there’s any rhyme or reason to it, but my application for Columbia was missing several elements and they made sure to contact me many times to make sure it was all there (all they way up until a week before decisions came out); same with Yale, USC, and Dartmouth (although Dartmouth was my friend and not me). </p>

<p>In case you’re curious, there was a lot of confusion between Collegeboard, my school, and my family’s documents which basically resulted in colleges not knowing my name or receiving any of my app materials in a timely fashion. Weirddd.</p>

4

<p>

Heh heh.
Well, CC is evidently a place where people don’t economize on threads, so … yeah, a world of threads.
By the way, Fire, if you know how to erase those year-old ones sitting at the top of the Brown Forum, or if you know a moderator who can, please do what you can.

Now this DOES interest me. Did they do it from being worn down by the new illiterate, text-messaging generation at Brown, the one that doesn’t know, for example, that you can borrow books from the library, or look up books in a library catalogue?
Or did they perhaps do it out of nostalgia for the old exurban, mainly white, children of the achieving class, who may just possibly be as interesting and creative as the beneficiaries of outreach programs?
I don’t mean to sound cynical. I’d really like to know what you know about the faculty input here. One does hear from faculty members of one’s acquaintance that 2009 Brownies aren’t 1989-standard Brownies.

The admissions staffs of Columbia, Yale, USC, and Dartmouth are better resourced than Brown, a university that is, comprehensively, a shoestring operation.
I say again, 19 admissions officers for 28,000 applicants is grotesquely irresponsible. Those 19 do heroic work.</p>

5

<p>This just in, jimsonweed writing as definite fact platitudinous conjecture mixed in with a teaspoon of fact!</p>

<p>Admissions is working hard, but hasn’t spent much longer than 15 minutes per application in many, many years. Admissions policies and practices changed years ago and have not changed in response to growth but rather changed prior to this growth not long after the entrance of Ruth and pushed a bit further by Dean Miller’s entrance. These changes had nothing to do with moving away from some so-called “Brown fit” model, although they did make our process somewhat more similar to other schools than in the past.</p>

<p>Faculty are not crying from the lack of talent in 2009 versus 1989, despite what jimson may tell you, at least not in the sciences where I’m hearing quite the reverse-- Brown students are stronger than ever in those fields. In other areas, I hear that Brown students are moving away from exotic exploration and tinkering within the curriculum where the expansion of seminars, concentrations, and ease of independent studies with professors has reduced non-traditional looking schedules, they are diverting that exotic-style of exploration further into their co-curricular activities.</p>

<p>Changing patterns with changing conditions and times. While Brown is USNews conscious, other than taking the most extreme and cynical view of what’s happened at Brown + ignoring every other major, and likely somewhat causative, you could not possibly conclude that it has acted as a motivator to change policies at Brown.</p>

<p>Let’s all be reactionary and pretend like we have some insider knowledge…</p>

6

<p>While I no expert, I find much of what you say unsupported, discouranging, and mostly arrogant. YOU are not an admission officer, my dear fellow, but your approach is that of a typical CCer.</p>

<p>Based on personel belief, you lack of faith with Brown is saddening, even if it may very well be true. However, I think you completely overestimate rankings.</p>

<p>Conversely, before attacks, I am, as stated, NO expert in this field, but I do know overly hyperbolic language when I see it. Not everything is so black and white.</p>

7

<p>Go Brownies!</p>

8

<p>

Well, I used to get paid for hyperbolic, conjectural, oracular (and not infrequently inaccurate) writing … so why stop now in my retirement, in my golden years.
Modest is on the battlefield and I do value his communiques from the rear-guard outpost.
I read his essays and have praised his tireless work on behalf of OUR school, for I am an alumnus too, an ancient one.
Ditto for Wolfman and Fire. We are on the same side, you and I.
We differ thus: I hate forlorn-hope exercises. I hate futility.
You can take the retail approach of answering one by one the endless sequence of scornful messages about Brown in College Confidential. But the retail approach only treats the symptoms.
Surely, Modest, you are better placed than anyone to know where Brown’s reputation presently sits.
There was no need for a Modestmelody in 1989 because there was no scorn, no “Brown is second-tier Ivy,” no “Brown is for slackers,” no “It’s between Brown and Wash U St. Louis,” no “Brown grads are unemployable compared to UPenn grads.”
There was instead the Brown buzz buzz buzz. When you wanted a code word in journalism to epitomize the selectivity phenomenon, that word was “Brown.” When you columnized (as I did) or composed your article for Harper’s or your segment for Sixty Minutes, it was “Brown” you selected as your signifier.
And visiting professors at Brown unanimously praised the student body as the best they had ever encountered.
No longer.
Instead there is Modest’s sisyphean labor of correcting the misinformed, dismissing the scornful, rationalizing the ever more blurred and indistinct Brown Curriculum, and imploring people to believe that Brown is not necessarily the doormat of the Ivy League, and might be nearly as good as UPenn.
That, as I say, is the retail approach. What’s needed is the wholesale approach, and I once asked Modest to become an activist for it on the Brown campus. He would find allies in the faculty, and he knows it.
Manifesto:
Item 1: Restore the 1970s and 1980s program of very loud and public promulgation of the Brown Curriculum. In various media. And get rid of the apologetic tone that’s crept into the present-day discussion.
Item 2: Reduce the student body size by at least 600. That would greatly improve the “quality of life” in the undergraduate curricular and amenities experience.
(And it would pay a US News rank dividend. I am not one who dismisses US News. I think it DOES measure something, namely resources, which translates in a palpable way to academic “quality of life.” If Brown had a 5400 student body, various “resources” ratios would improve palpably.)
Item 3: Support the humanities at the expense of, yes, at the expense of the sciences. Brown is not a competitive sciences university. It literally can’t afford to be one.
If we build a $95 million life sciences facility, Cornell and Yale will build $400 million facilities. It’s a race we can never win. Ever.
Meanwhile, we might have been attracting a Yale-standard or Princeton-standard humanities faculty, using the money presently poured into the insatiable maw of the sciences.
(Incidentally, our medical school has CORRUPTED us.)
Item 4: Revive Brown University Press. It’s a disgrace that we let our press die. It had an important niche in linguistics. Graduate students will tell you what the presence of a press signifies.
Item 5: Recognize this eternal fact about Brown: Its only feasible area of preeminence is – student body. Brown will never have the money to be preeminent anywhere else.
There is a strategy for student body preeminence at Brown. We once employed it and we should recover it.</p>

9

<p>Jim’s right that it is much better to spend the $ on the humanities and social sciences faculty dollar for dollar.</p>

10

<p>Thank you, jimsonweed, for your perspective. Your prior posts didn’t seem to be pointing in this direction at all, and personally I was turned off by them because it sounded like you were rooting against Brown in this whole process. As a Brunonian, I’m always rooting for my school, and had I realized you were too (as you clearly are with your last post, you just don’t think it’s going in the right direction) I may have paid more attention to the content.</p>

<p>Here’s my take on your views of how Brown’s going/how it should be going</p>

<p>1: I’m not sure Brown isn’t loud about it’s New Curriculum. It was the only reason I was even interested in it when I applied. I can’t remember how I found out, but nearly every publication, website, etc. I’ve heard about Brown has at its focus the New Curriculum. Now, maybe back in the 70s and 80s every Ivy-quality student knew about the New Curriculum, which I’d agree would be nice, as it’d help draw any of those independent thinkers towards Brown.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Brown may have grown too quickly (I’m a freshman, so I’m not at all sure about this, and I don’t know). It would be nice to have more money/student (OK, I’m just going to ramble to myself here: tuition: $38,848/student, ~44% (let’s say 1/2) receive $34,452 in aid, and housing/food costs should be a wash, on average, so I won’t count that in the + or - bit. This means the university ends up “making” about $21,000/student). However, I’m not sure reducing the headcount would, at this point, accomplish that goal. We now have our facilities, and unless we’re going to build new dorms to accommodate students (i.e. to try and get more than 20% of seniors to stay on campus) then it doesn’t follow that fewer students will mean more money. I think at this point Ruth Simmon’s fundraising goals are likely a better way of improving these ratios, and if she continues being as successful as she has been, and the economy eventually turns around, Brown should end up in a fairly good position, resource-wise.</p></li>
<li><p>I agree that Brown will never be a graduate powerhouse in Physics or likely even Biology or Chemistry, without seriously changing the make-up of the student body by giving ourselves too many graduate students. However, that’s not true for all sciences, and that shouldn’t be true for the undergraduate programs in the sciences, especially if we don’t fall into the trap of saying that all that matters about a professor is their research, rather than a mix between what new contributions they can make to academia, and how well they can get others onboard with those ideas (i.e. teach). To do this we’d have to stop trying to increase our “ranking” or “academic prestige” for our sciences, and allow students interested in Brown discover the strength outside of a USNWR-type ranking. To this extent, I’d say people like Jim Valles, whose research very few budding physicists have heard about, but who is extremely involved in the school, his department and the many students he meets makes a better contribution than Chinua Achebe, who will essentially be a guest-lecturer his entire career at Brown.
And that’s not even touching the fact that Brown IS a competitive sciences university in a few fields, such as Computer Science (though we may not make it high on the rankings due to graduate-program size: we have John Savage, Andy van Dam, Shriram, etc.) and Cognitive Science (if what I was told is right, a department grown form an IC). Then again, maybe the facilities for these programs are less expensive for top-name researchers than for sciences such as Physics and Biology.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d love to see us have our own press.</p></li>
<li><p>I pretty much agree: we should be trying to attract independent thinkers rather than “top-quality” students. Even though in many instances these students coincide, I’d much rather have students here who dream and do, rather than students who work and study.</p></li>
</ol>

11

<p>In 1989, Brown was mainly known as the school where crazy things happened, like the suicide pill movement and the list of date rapists in the bathrooms in the libraries. Brown has been a “hot” school since the late 1970s, but has never – never – had the national reputation of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. </p>

<p>I really don’t know where you get your info from, jimsonweed, but I think your memory of Brown in the 1980s is a fantasy. It sure isn’t the Brown I knew in the 1980s.</p>

<p>I think it is crucial to have strong science departments. Essential. I think it’s sad that the engineering department has not kept up with the times, and I am glad resources are going into turning that around. </p>

<p>I know nothing about university presses, but since book publication is a dying industry, I’d hate to see my alumni donations go to support a money-losing operation like that. I’d rather my donations go to financial aid and the sciences.</p>

<p>And, BTW, that fantasy school you are talking about did not have need-blind admissions.</p>

12

<p>As another Brown affiliated person, and one who has had an affliliation with Penn as well, I would like to contribute my .02 to this conversation. One can dismiss the U.S. News collegiate rankings publications all they want, but it is important. I saw Penn go from a school that, frankly, many students resented being at instead of other Ivies to one where the student body feels as if it’s one of the top four universities in the nation. The change in vibe is palpable, and has spawned institutional momentum in fund-raising, school spirit and pride, student body quality, and enhanced institutional infrastructure.</p>

<p>The fact of the matter is someone looking at an expensive, private, university like Brown is understandably perplexed when the school is such an outlier on the low end when compared with contemporaries in the same conference. It raises questions. Is the alumni network, like Princeton, such that connections can be made to facilitate access to quality post-Brown opportunities in a variety of endeavors? Is the differential in quality of the administration and study body so lacking that if, say, I want to be a national political figure going to Brown disadvantages one far more than going to Harvard? Why is it that Brown’s undergraduate engineering program, purportedly the oldest in the country, is so lacking in comparison to, say, Cornell or MIT? </p>

<p>The U.S. News ranking does point to an institutional culture at Brown that spawns, how can I say this, a lack of true greatness. The school has been, and remains, a very good school. However it, for some reason, doesn’t seem to be able to compete with similarly old schools in creating correlatively appropriate endowments, national figures of importance, or some ethereal charisma that the great schools have. That is why people talk about schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, or even Penn or Dartmouth.</p>

<p>Brown needs a complete overall of the way it is. A smaller student body, more emphasis on the sciences and engineering, an academic publishing press, hiring the best fund managers to create a 5 billion + endowment, a full-fledged business school based on the Yale paradigm, and a concerted effort to do what it takes to get genuine geniuses to attend the school rather than upper one third of the class boarding school students from St. Paul’s, Choate, Groton, or Andover. I’ve never seen a Valedictorian from any of the top-tier boarding schools make Brown their first choice.</p>

<p>These are just some of the thoughts I’ve been harboring for some time about the school.</p>

13

<p>It’s funny how much of that post I disagree with completely. Business school at Brown?</p>

<p>Your post basically ignores the history of Brown and how it got to be where it is and when, and the culture of Brown and what has made it unique such that it is one of the most selective schools in the country in spite of relatively fewer resources than some peers (though this is something which is far more complex than endowment). It is highly reductionist, elitist, and aimed precisely where a school like Brown shouldn’t go. It actually sounds like the current Republican political strategy.</p>

<p>Where do you think we want to be pulling students from? Choate or huge areas of the country where students never applied to Brown in the past? Frankly, we don’t need the bright kids from Choate or Andover or the prestige that comes with it, and the fact that you probably came from one of those places clearly skews your perspective of the national applicant pool and where the best students are.</p>

14

<p>@modestmelody:</p>

<p>I think you might have misread Pinderhughes’ post a bit. It seems this person is lamenting that Brown prefers to take numerous students from the top 33% of the New England boarding schools rather than the elite candidates from all over - I can confirm that Brown will go fairly deep into the applicant pools at these boarding schools, although the “top” candidates at these schools tend not to want to apply to Brown. I myself was barely in the top 10% (so I would have been around 30/317) at such a school.</p>

15

<p>Uroogla, your interpretation of what I said is correct. Rather than take someone who is in the top 20% of his class at St. Paul’s, I would rather see the admissions staff expanded so that recruitment of talent can occur anywhere in the world, irregardless of the private school vs. public school dichotomy.</p>

16

<p>My impression is that Brown (and other Ivies) have been accepting fewer students from the top prep schools, compared to a couple decades ago. I’ve heard parents who send their kids to those schools lamenting the change – that it is no longer a given that a prep school is an automatic pass to the Ivies. Unfortunately, because of decades (centuries?) of relationships between these prep schools and admissions offices, this change can’t happen overnight. These prep schools also provide many of the athletes for certain sports – and full-pay students. </p>

<p>Brown will go deep into the classes at these prep schools, while it doesn’t do that for the vast majority of public schools (where they tend to accept the top 1-5 students). Why does that happen? Is it because they think a kid ranked 30/300 at a prep school is just as smart as number 3 at a public (while number 30/300 at a public isn’t)? What would happen if they started treating the prep schools the way they do publics, and only accept kids in the top 2-3 percent?</p>

17

<p>I believe that if Brown did that, some (though not all) students would not go to these prep schools because they would believe they’d stand a much better chance in the admission process at their public schools. I don’t know how true it is in reality, but many students in the top 20-40% of these private schools do believe they’d be at or very near the top at their public school.</p>

<p>With that said, some of the numbers are skewed, as fireandrain mentioned, by sports - these private schools are, I gather, heavily recruited for crew, since there don’t exist too many other HS programs for crew. As far as the full-pay, I think it depends on the school. Andover and Exeter at least have what I believe is a similar percentage of students on FA to what Brown has - the perception of wealth at these schools may still be there, but they’re trying to become more and more collegiate themselves with diversity on an economic basis.</p>

<p>For better or worse, these private schools have a reputation as being more rigorous than the “average” school. I can confirm from a 110+ year old newspaper article (unsure if I’d be able to find it again sadly; I ran across it in a completely unrelated search) that it used to be that pretty much everyone at these schools used to go to an Ivy League college, so the percentage has come down quite a bit. With that said, I’m not sure where the trend is headed now. The Ivies have, in recent years (and not just since the recession), been taking more and more students from these schools.</p>

<p>I’m not convinced either way, myself. Certainly not going as deep into prep school classes would enable them to take a wider range of students from public schools, particularly those at the very top. This would make people at a wider range of schools interested at Brown, and it might (I don’t claim to know what the average SAT scores of top public school applicants are) raise the average test scores, which would look good (even though I’m not positive this is Brown’s goal). On the other hand, it might not. Practically, they’d lose pretty much all matriculation from these private schools - those at the very top of these classes almost always attend HYPM. Many of the acceptances at these schools near the top are for students using schools like Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell as a quasi-safety: the schools may not actually be safeties, but past data suggests that there’s a very good chance of students of their caliber getting accepted. Obviously the perception would eventually change with this approach, but I’m not sure that this would make these students see Brown as more selective; I’d imagine fewer applications from the most qualified candidates, not more, as long as HYPSM have bigger names.</p>

<p>Either way, I don’t see Brown (or any other Ivy, honestly) treating prep schools exactly how they do the privates at any time in the near future.</p>

<p>On a different note, I wonder what Brown’s “grade inflation” has to do with the relative lack of prestige. I understand that, of courses taken for a grade, roughly 67% of grades are As (iirc, 50% of grades are As, 25% are pass/fail, so conditional probability gives 67%). This leads to the belief, founded or not, that Brown is not as rigorous as its competition (notably Princeton), since one can take any course one wouldn’t get an A in pass/fail. That’s obviously not the purpose of pass/fail, but that’s one perception of it. I recently took a course where it seems everyone in the class got an A. Perhaps we all deserved it (I don’t believe in a hard cap on the percentage of As in a course), but it seems strange that everyone in the class was doing such incredible work as to deserve an A in a somewhat subjective discipline (Classics). Many Brown students don’t care too much about grades, it’s more about learning. But it seems that this would drive away a lot of qualified potential applicants, since they don’t believe they’d be able to distinguish themselves. They may not be the type of applicants Brown wants, but they’re nevertheless the sorts of applicants that would boost Brown’s prestige. This makes me wonder how much it would cost what’s special about Brown to raise their rank and prestige.</p>

18

<p>I don’t think the perception of grade inflation at Brown adversely affects the school’s prestige at all. All of the Ivies suffer from the perception of grade inflation, especially in comparison to Chicago, MIT, and Caltech. </p>

<p>Let me step back a comment for a second about Brown’s prestige. As a fellow Brunonian, I reserve the right to be critical of my alma mater. However, make no mistake about something. In the rarefied confines of the upper class, Brown is very, very, prestigious. Remember, the freedom to pursue the best of Western traditions are there, the faculty is there, for all of our complaints, the infrastructure for a mid-sized university is there, and the upper social classes have been educated, and want their children to be educated, to read critically, to take charge of their environment(education), and to creatively replicate the tenets of the market economy that has bestowed them with priviledge and advantage and Brown does this. Ironically, Brown’s prestige is less among the middle and working classes. Mainly, adults and children in the latter to classes are educated to follow orders, to be bossed not to boss, to follow clearly delineated structure. Brown as an institution is the antithesis of this, and this why among the upper social classes Brown is so prestigious, and is much less so among the lower classes.</p>

19

<p>

</p>

<p>The “perception” (better known as reality in this case) is that Brown is a clear and well-known outlier in the permissiveness of its grading compared to all other Ivy League universities, whatever their own level of grade inflation may be compared to other peer institutions.</p>

<p>That Brown is an outlier is evidenced by the grade distribution data on Brown’s web pages, by the testimony of Brown transfer students to or from other Ivies, by the formulas used by law schools to adjust undergraduate GPA by institution, by the comments of instructors and postdocs who have taught at Brown and other schools, and by the grade averages posted at gradeinflation.com. There is enough evidence, in fact, that calling it a questionable matter of “perception” is spin control.</p>

<p>Stanford was the only competitor school with similar grade inflation historically, but that may or may not be the case today with the increased emphasis on science, technology and medicine, and the scaling back of preferences for legacies and Californians.</p>

20

<p>Some quick calculations from the links at gradeinflation.com actually gave me some surprising information. If we, for a moment, pretend that NCs appeared on our transcripts as a 0 towards GPA (the site uses 4.0 = A, 3.0 = B, 2.0 = C), still ignoring grades of S, since there’s no way to know how to deal with those, the average for 2007-2008 is a 3.444. This is much more in-line with the results from the other Ivies. It had struck me as disturbing that 67% of grades taken on the A/B/C/NC scale were As, but it appears that this is roughly similar to the other Ivies.</p>

<p>So it seems the major difference is that courses not successfully passed do not appear on one’s transcript (I suspect, but cannot show, that if there were no S/NC option, these numbers would go down further into the Cornell/Princeton range). There seems to be some perception from students applying to other Ivies that Brown is an easier school because of the ability to take every course pass/fail and because failing doesn’t show up on our transcripts. I highly doubt Brown would change that policy to improve how it’s viewed, however - the policy is one of the fundamental aspects of what makes it Brown.</p>