@Findmoreinfo ACT/SAT scores are not necessarily “the most objective indicator of the caliber of students!” Actually they are more of an indicator of resources and prep, and colleges are becoming much more increasingly aware of this. In the classroom, the kids in my school with the 30ish ACT scores run circles around the kids with the 34+ scores, and are the much stronger peer group. Think about what you are proposing: Kids who score in the 95th-98th decile (30-32 ACT) are a “much stronger peer group” than kids in the 99th decile (33+ ACT). No. You are making a big mistake by making your daughter choose a college based on this. And actually if she agrees with you, she wouldn’t even be a fit for Brown.
your explanations showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how SAT scores are used in the college application process. To quibble over a 25 point difference in average scores is lunacy. To state that a larger school having a higher SAT score automatically means it’s a stronger student body or applicant pool is absurd.
I have never commented about which school is harder or easier to get into. If you must know, I think they are equivalent (obviously not the answer you want to hear though). If you look at the beginnings of the thread - you’ll see that for graduate schools I don’t think the rankings are completely useless but one must take them with a grain of salt. So yeah, I’m going to point out why these rankings you’re citing are flawed to begin with (not worthless, flawed as in not perfectly accurate) and I admit I never got into why they’re even less relevant for undergrads than grad students which was the point I was making in the very beginning.
So yes, I said two things you said were patently false. The idea that larger schools maintaing higher SAT average is indicative of being a stronger school and that the ASEE data for Brown does not include Computer Science students. The latter is really something you can’t question. The ASEE data is for the school of engineering and the brown school of engineering does not include the computer science department. The former you simply refuse to acknowledge and that’s your prerogative. You’re certainly not the first nor the last person who thinks the SAT is an extremely accurate and meaningful measure of a student’s caliber and that every single point represents a meaningful increase in someone’s academic merit for college admissions. Adcoms on the other hand do not agree with you though or HYP which is i believe 4500-5000 freshmen each year wouldn’t have a single student scoring below 2330 (since about 5k kids score 2330 or higher each year). The bottom 25% at Harvard is below 2100.
If you didn’t want to argue for lost account than you shouldn’t have jumped in on his analogy. I apologize for the assumptions about LV and BB although you’ve yet to prove which one moves more units. Your $500/$3k price average were pulled out of thin air.
I’m really stunned you wanted your daughter to apply to Brown. It’s clear you thought well before you got here that it’s inferior to Cornell.
@findmoreinfo - I truly was trying to help in your process. I really don’t think it’s necessary to insult me. Especially with poor grammar. Would it help if I said you weren’t concerned with ranking at all- only with stats? Okay then. You’re sadly missing the point and reading your last post I think I understand now. Good luck to you and your daughter.
@vistajay we struggled and continue to struggle with this same question. My wife and I attended a state university, and I’ve calculated that just one class at Brown cost 150% MORE than what my ENTIRE 4 years of college tuition cost my parents. That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. I also have two others kids I have to put through college.
My daughter is pursuing the hopeless career path of theatre, and we stumbled upon Brown as a good theatre program. We saw it as a once in a lifetime opportunity for her and decided to go for it. We feel like she’s smart enough to figure her way in the world, and Brown was a good place to prepare her for an unstable and highly competitive field. We figured worse case, if theatre does not work out, she’ll at least have an Ivy League liberal arts degree she can peddle to corporate America.
The more I learn about Brown, the more I really like it. My daughter described the students there as being highly engaged but at the same time not giving a sh*t; which sounds confusing but I’m starting to understand it. It’s sort of a “why not” attitude. At Parents weekend we saw a documentary film http://vimeo.com/91641978 where the attitude was described as “constructive irreverence.”
My D has befriended a senior who sort of mentors her, and while still in school he has started his own theatre company based in Boston, which I find extraordinary. At Brown, the undergrads sit on the board that determine the school’s theatre season. They also have free reign of an entire decent-sized building where they write, produce, direct and perform their own work.
Biology prof Kenneth Miller sort of discusses the same DYI undergrad chaos in the research labs at Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aNp6bJCAhU
I remember someone on CC describing a college graduate pursuing a career in Journalism,who might independently buy a plane ticket to Africa walk up to a depot in a hotel lobby, interview him and then blog about it. I certainly think Brown fosters that type of DIY entrepreneurial attitude and spirit - that you might not find in a more structured environment.
Also the people there are extraordinary IMO. My daughter is friends with a Rugby payer who is attempting to triple concentrate in CS, engineering, and neuroscience despite advice that it is not possible, She has a friend who is a conservatory-level violinist, music major in the PLME program - meaning she’s already accepted to Brown’s medical school. A friend who is a neuroscience major and a photographer. Oh and her randomly assigned roommate’s father happens to be an accomplished film writer and director. She’s been able to work with a visiting professor from the Yale school of Drama. She’s been able to work with one of the top dialect coaches in the industry, who is on faculty at Brown. Her adjunct theatre prof at Brown worked with the original SNL cast and is an amazing teacher according to my daughter.
As you can guess, I’m really sold on Brown. My son wants to pursue CS, and even though our inexpensive and excellent state school is ranked #5 in CS by USNWR, we’re thinking about Brown for him as well.
Best of luck! I don’t think you could go wrong with Brown or Fordham.
despot*
@arwarw - I was so glad to read your post! Thank you for sharing your daughter’s experience. Our son was accepted to Brown ED and plans on concentrating in CS. Although part of me was surprised that Brown was his first choice - after we visited, I saw that it is perfect for him. He is an independent "out of the box’ thinker, wants to do his own thing and the description of being “highly engaged but at the same time not giving a ****”, fits him to a T. I’m confident his experience there will be worth the cost of tuition.
@vistajay, I would love to sit here and tell you about how amazing Brown is and how it’s worth every penny (and if you had all the pennies and just wanted to know if it was worth the extra dough I would definitely do that) but I honestly don’t know if it (or any school frankly) is worth financially sandbagging your family.
@wrenwu congratulations to your son! Tell him to check out Pre-Orientation. My D loved it. It’s free and a good way to beat the rush of move-in day. http://brown.edu/academics/college/orientation/pre-orientation-programs
This article is one of the featured threads right now: http://www.salon.com/2015/01/11/ivy_leagues_meritocracy_lie_how_harvard_and_yale_cook_the_books_for_the_1_percent/
I generally avoid featured threads so hadn’t read it until it started popping up on my Facebook feed but it’s an absolute must read and of course very relevant to this whole discussion.
Some quotes to whet your appetite:
USNWR’s ranking methology relies on the SAT/ACT score but not heavily, just 8.125% of the total points. If anything it relies more on reputation and resources:
Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent)
Faculty resources (20 percent)
SAT/ACT Score (8.125 percent)
Portion of freshmen who graduated in the top 10 percent of their HS (3.125 percent)
Admission Rate (1.25 percent)
Retention (22.5 percent)
Financial resources (10 percent)
Graduation rate performance (7.5 percent)
Alumni giving rate (5 percent)
@arwarw - which pre-orientation program did your daughter do? It seems like there are a few (Catalyst, Excellence at Brown). Do you have to stay the whole week? And did you stay for any of it?
@wrenwu - she did the Third World Transition Program. She stayed the whole week, and we did not attend, but we did travel up the following weekend to help her furnish her dorm room.
@rajit170696 I suppose we have lost you by now, but Brown is actually ranked quite well for graduate CS which you are referring to as I’m not sure there is any reliable ranking for undergraduate. Remember that Brown CS is in Arts & Sciences as it grew out of the mathematics department. It is small compared to some of the School of Engineering departments but it is very productive and well regarded and has experts in many fields. My daughter worked with a Cryptography expert and Security and Privacy and had a paper published based on work she did as an undergraduate. Grad school rankings are based on reputation and research productivity and 22 or so is quite high, do not be misled by this. Also this is nice for undergraduate, but papers published don’t directly effect undergraduate teaching as you will need to learn your programming languages, architecture, algorithms and data structures and compilers and theory. Brown built a department balanced in theory and practice. Undergraduate research abounds.
Also you may not be familiar, but all medical schools in the U.S. are excellent. There are no bad ones. They all have extremely high standards and students are lucky to be accepted to any of them. Ranking of med school is not a particular concern for practicing MD’s. And after med school you will have a residency somewhere. No one cares where a Doctor went to med school. Only a researcher. As undergrad students are not in the medical school I don’t know what your concern is anyway. Brown undergraduate is very good for pre med studies.
Try not to confuse going to grad school with going to undergrad school. Selecting a grad school is very specialized on what you want to study. Good luck.
Maybe you didn’t realize how many strong CS grad schools there are. The #1 slot are the kings, the rest excellent. You will get a superb CS education at any listed here. For an interesting fact. I included number of faculty. There is no way to tell which teach undergraduates as well as PhD’s (at Brown all teach undergrads and supervise grad students) and I don’t have a student count, which would be interesting.
Grad School Ranking CS (number of CS faculty)
- CMU (131), MIT (80), Berkeley (54), Stanford (52) 5.UIUC (57) 6, Cornell (36), UW-Seattle (49)
- Princeton (32)
- Georgia Tech (93), UT Austin (38) 11, Cal Tech (15), UW-Madison (38)
- UCLA (40), Michigan (59)
- Columbia (48), UC San Diego (57), UMD College Park0)
- Harvard (25), Penn (31)
- Brown (30), Purdue (48), Rice (20), USC (54), Yale (20 )
And many more good CS colleges follow.
@2018dad I agree, that’s misleading.
But if we just look at the selectivity index that’s referenced in the quote from Sarah Lawrence’s president: the selectivity index is just SAT score, proportion of freshman in top% of class and admission rate. SAT score is thus the majority of the “selectivity index.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_the_United_States#U.S.News.26_World_Report_College_and_University_rankings)
The selectivity index used to be 15% in 2013, was 12.5% in 2014 (http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/09/03/preview-methodology-changes-for-2014-best-colleges-rankings), and now, as you’ve pointed out, it’s 12.375% for 2015. I doubt it was stagnant for 7 years prior (i.e. going back to the year in question) to get to 15% in 2013? No idea if this is reasonable to do (it probably isn’t), but let’s assume the drop from 15 to 12.375% over the last 2 years was extended back to 2005. That would put the selectivity index at 25.5% of the rankings in 2005. I don’t know what your definition of “heavily” is but that could have meant the SAT score was 1/8 of the ranking despite being 1/17 parameters.
Regardless, I think the bigger take away is that Sarah Lawrence decided to stop using the SAT and thus stop submitting data to USNWR and so USNWR decided to just start making up data for SLU and assumed they must be 200 points lower than their peer group.
Jesus, I was like OP two and a half years ago where I was obsessed with rankings (why is brown only 14th, not top 10, etc.), but now I realize how stupid I was. None of this matters at all. As a junior, literally every top company recruits here–Goldman, Bain, McKinsey, E&Y Boston Consulting Group. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason for it. Your success in life after attending a top college like Brown, or any other top school for the matter, will not matter for the ranking, but for what you did and how well you did.
Once you start moving through college, you’ll start realizing this OP–I promise.
Not everyone sees the fact that recruiters from companies like Goldman come on campus as evidence a school is doing well-but fits a certain stereotype of Brown. But they all recruit at most selective schools. No one ranking list is perfect but looking at a few of them while also looking at the criteria used for ranking can be very helpful. Select the ranking lists that weigh heavily the variables you think are important to you.
^first sentence of post above: huh???
And let me not forget the army of CS students who get internships at Google each summer–it’s insane actually