Cornell & Brown

Why are Brown & Cornell constantly held in lesser regard than all the other ivies. I feel like their academics are just as good or even more excelling than these so called “middle” ivies which have a supposed graduate focus. Any thoughts or input highly appreciated.
Thank you!

HYP have lower acceptance rates but Cornell, as the biggest Ivy, has always had the “highest” acceptance rate and had that “lesser ivy” rep. Honestly I never really heard that about Brown.

The reality is that depending on your major, Cornell could be the strongest academically. Dyson has the lowest acceptance rate of any Ivy program, and Cornell is very strong in engineering.

These are all great schools. Go where you have the best fit and don’t worry about the rankings.

@momofsenior1 , Thank you for your input! It serves as a reassurance. My counsellor asked me for a list on paper and she left it in her desk where they could all see it, so she and some peers were wondering why those two were the ivies I chose, and I never wanted anyone to see my college list because of this exact reason. They started with the whole ivy ranking thing and comparing our lists X_X

@tcrf15 :

People who are having this kind of hallucination and ask this kind of stupid question almost never successfully got in any of the top tier schools, not to mention Ivies. Cornell has the strongest engineering programs among all the Ivies. The acceptance rates for those schools are in the range of 1 in 10 to 1 in 16. You should first ask yourself “what do I have in my resume to stand out??”. People who have any chance of being admitted to those schools at least know the basics. Focus on your “lesser” schools and hope that you can get into one of them.

There is no such thing as a middle tier Ivy League colleges – they are all top tier universities. Apply to schools that are the best fit.

The Ivy with the highest regarded engineering program (Cornell, U.S. News) should not be considered as a “lesser” school. Also, by a non-academic, albeit subjective, attribute, campus beauty, Cornell would seem to excel among the Ivies as well.

Just some numbers. Brown accepted 2,566 of 35,438 that applied for the class of 2022. That’s a 7.24 acceptance rate. Stated differently 32,872 applicants were rejected. For the class of 2021 Brown had 1,603 valedictorians apply and accepted 306 (19%) and accepted 14% or 100 of the 738 salutatorians that applied. That means Brown rejected 1,935 Valedictorians and Salutatorians.

Often Brown’s open curriculum draws critics to suggest it lacks rigor. In reality it creates an engaged classroom setting in which all s,rudeness are there by choice. The focus is on learning not grades. The student body tends to work cohesively to learn as opposed to competing for grades.

It isn’t for everyone but it certainly has produced great results, and remains one of the ten most competitive colleges in the US to gain admission to. Also of note the WSJ ranks Brown number 7, Forbes places Brown 8, Niche 10th and while USNews has the school at 14th. Within these top 20s there are some apple and orange comparisons. Brown and schools like MIT, U Chicago or Caltech only share a stellar reputation for prestige, elitism and academics, but the areas of focus, types of curriculum and student bodies they attract are almost completely disparate. With this dynamic in mind, the ratings as noted and their low acceptance ratings, Brown sits at the very top of undergraduate focused schools that offers a flexible curriculum along with the research opportunities, and prestige of a 200+ Year old Ivy League school.

Good luck with your applications. One last piece of advice is that must successful Brown kids could care less about what others think. They embrace their independence and are proud to display it.

re #1:
“…has always had the “highest” acceptance rate …”
Actually not always. For one thing, when I applied, and for a good part of the Vietnam era when business was not “cool” and the big cities were in tatters, Penn had the highest acceptance rate. By a material amount. And was considered the “lesser-most” ivy. FWIW. As far as I can recall, this didn’t really change till the cities started recovering and Wall street became “cool” again, plus Penn got some huge donations, in the early 80s.

“I never really heard that about Brown”
From what I’ve read, Brown had that reputation earlier, before the Magaziner “open curriculum” was devised…
It only resurfaced in recent years because of its US News rankings which did not correspond to its admissions rates.
US News has slightly hurt Brown’s reputation, IMO. Obviously what they are ranking does not perfectly conform to the value candidates see. A lot of this is due to its smaller grad school, I think. Resulting in lower rankings in categories relating to outstanding faculty. But I may be mistaken.

As for Cornell, it’s all about admissions rates/stats IMO. The ag school and the hotel school get joked about by the others sometimes, but IMO none of this would matter if the admissions rates were the same.
Though there are other differences. Its undergrad class size is bigger, more seats to fill.

per #7, re: Brown, this is a post I found long ago on an old usenet newgroup, accuracy not guaranteed:

" The story of how Brown has come to attract ambitious self-starters as
applicants is well-told in Bill Mayher’s 1998 book, The College Admissions
Mystique. In 1969, Brown’s new admissions director James Rogers decided that
he ought to be able to exploit the Magaziner-Maxwell curriculum to pull
Brown out from underneath the doormat of the Ivy League. And underneath the
doormat is where it was.

When I was applying to colleges at that time, Brown was all but
invisible to the college placement office of my prep school. Between Brown
and the other Ivies in the pecking order there lay twenty schools, including
most of the Seven Sisters, Wesleyan, Haverford, Bowdoin, the service
academies, Reed and other top regional schools, and perhaps five top state
universities. In New England, Brown was considered better than Trinity and
Brandeis, but only barely better. The favorite backup college choices at my
prep school were North Carolina, Wesleyan, Penn, and, believe it or not,
Stanford (which accepted the bottom-ranked person in my class).

In the mid-1960s Wesleyan was enjoying a real vogue. It had got rich
all of a sudden (Xerox stock), had published Norman O. Brown’s Life Against
Death, and was helping invent minority recruitment. Because Middletown is
close to Providence, Wesleyan has always shared its applicant pool with
Brown, and in those days, as Ron Medley may wi****lly recall, Wesleyan was
unquestionably the harder place to get into.

So in 1969, James Rogers of Brown considered his situation and hit on a
plan which is now legendary among admissions officers. He hired members of
the classes of 1970 and 1971 and sent them out on the road to pitch the
Brown Curriculum. Their instructions were to look for students in the second
quintile who were lively interviewees and who showed iconoclastic
tendencies. The Young Turks of the admissions office made a hit wherever
they went and applications rose almost immediately. Rogers was then in a
position to implement phase two. He began rejecting students in the top
quintile who had made Brown their third choice. Word quickly went round the
secondary school placement offices that Brown was no longer easy.

There was another component of the Rogers strategy, one that Bill
Mayher’s book misses. Rogers was a preppy from Taft and understood that it
is preppies who put elite colleges in fashion. Rogers made Brown
prep-friendly. He began to accept twenty and thirty people a year from
Andover, Exeter, Choate, St. Paul’s, and Harvard-Westlake. He made Brown the
first backup choice at the leading schools, and by the mid-1970s, New York,
Los Angeles, and the exurbs of America had gotten the message. The seal of
approval was given in a 1975 article in the Sunday New York Times, titled
“Everybody Wants to Go to Brown.” (There have been many such articles since,
culminating in a perverse extravaganza in last February’s Vanity Fair,
titled “School for Glamour.”) "

By standardized scoring figures, both Cornell and Brown slotted in historically with the center of the Ivy League :

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1897982-the-historical-selectivity-of-colleges-by-sat-score-tiers-p1.html

More old threads on historical stats, one can look up and compare particular schools if you care:to:

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/167854-changing-prestige-of-schools-p1.html

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/355053-college-rankings-from-1966-p1.html

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/893126-1966-adjusted-sat-scores-vs-1996-scores-of-a-bunch-of-schools-p1.html
The chart that the OP of this last thread refers to is here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305030809/http://gradeinflation.com/SATcomparison.html

@Nocreativity1
I completely agree with you that open curriculum does not mean less rigor. I believe some critics also focus on grade inflation (real or perceived) which again is not unique to Brown

http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/03/12/fighting-grade-inflation-cause-without-rebel/