<p>for someone who is not very interested in business and who wants to major in economics/philosophy?</p>
<p>Can someone also please explain why Brown (with its 13% admit rate --4th lowest among the ivies, i think) is ranked 15th in USNEWS and has been going down recently? No offense, but why is Cornell undergrad ranked higher than Brown?</p>
<p>brown has a small endowment.</p>
<p>its the same reason why georgetown is ranked 23rd.</p>
<p>oh... so a college or univ needs a strong grad skool to be ranked high? since much of donatoin comes from grad skool graduates?</p>
<p>Brown only has a medical school and graduate school in arts/sciences/engineering. Grad students number only 1000 while undergrads are 5600 or so. It's endowment is also lower, comparatively.</p>
<p>US news is seriously junk. Do you really believe that Upenn is above Stanford? </p>
<p>No college ranking can be considered the truth about which college is better than the other, but there are others... <a href="http://brody.com/college/resources/college_rankings.php%5B/url%5D">http://brody.com/college/resources/college_rankings.php</a>
<a href="http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf</a></p>
<p>A lot of factors go into those things that have very little weight in your undergraduate experience. Obviously, a school with a massive endowment is more likely to give good financial aid, have pretty buildings, etc, but it doesn't make a huge difference to the average undergrad whether the endowment is 2 billion or 5 billion. Similarly, the number of awards that professors win is certainly important to the reputation of the school, and it is true that profs who win more research recognition might also be better teachers, but if they don't teach undergrads (or do, but don't do it well), then it doesn't help you out much.</p>
<p>The US news rankings really dont make much of a difference... They take into account factors that will never affect you at brown - size of endowment as mentioned above, percentage of alumni who donate (***?!), grad school strength etc... For undergrad however, brown is far better then its rankings...</p>