<p>EATYOURCEREAL, you did not “choose” Cornell over Penn. You were never accepted to Penn.</p>
<p>Also, Brown was indeed considered the worst Ivy League school until the late 60s. Read this, Monydad originally posted it:
" 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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”) "</p>