Dartmouth vs. Brown vs. UPenn

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Hi guys, I would extremely appreciate if you could tell me the pros and cons of each school as I'm weighing on which one to apply ED to. Just some background info. : I'm thinking of pursuing a business major but I do want options open in case I find out that business is not for me. I do want to apply to a school thought as prestigious and well respected (i know this shouldn't matter but i would really like to please my parents. Please don't bash.). Thirdly, I would like to be happy but know that my degree will open a lot of job opportunities for me. Here is what I have so far:</p>

<p>Dartmouth:
Pros: Lot of study abroad and it's encouraged (i would love to study abroad so if you know of any other school that encourages s.a please tell me!) ; has good Tuck MBA program so the classes must be good ; i can take a variety of classes ; Not that far from CT
Cons: Lots of Frats/drinking </p>

<p>Brown:
Pros: Close to home; I love the culture and people here! ; I feel like I would be happy ; open curriculum
Cons: Not as prestigious; kind of hard to get into ED esp. this year with Emma Watson being there; I have no idea of what i would study here ; there doesn't seem to be a lot of rich businessmen from this school?</p>

<p>UPENN:
Pros: Wharton
Cons: Unsafe surroundings; didnt really get a campus feel ; frat atmosphere like dartmouth but less; too urban not much shopping/restaurants around though like cambridge</p>

2

<p>i’ve written about this in previous posts. if you wanted to pursue business after college i would seek programs that either have great economics or undegrad business programs. a few that i can think of right off the bat are chicago, mit, stanford, along with the programs you mentioned. brown tends to have the weakest training when it comes to your interests. ivies are not the only programs you should be considering.</p>

3

<p>Program strength isn’t everything. Both Dartmouth and Penn have traditionally had superb business placement, and Brown does reasonably well for itself. I agree that normally it would be odd that Stanford (or Duke, for that matter) isn’t on his/her radar, but the OP is clearly looking at schools near home.</p>

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I disagree with most of your cons about Brown. They’re all extremely prestigious, they’re all difficult to get into, and with the open curriculum, I’m sure you could explore and find a major to fit your interests.</p>

4

<p>I’d go with Dartmouth or Penn</p>

<p>Wharton should please your parents</p>

5

<p>I’m with IB. It should be noted that Brown has an unusually high number of entrepreneurs, from my understanding. I would post the number of self-employed graduates 10 years out but the Office of Institutional Research recently removed that PDF from their webpage.</p>

<p>What kind of “business” are you interested in? I always think it’s funny to hear people say they want to study “business”. In some areas, science concentrators and engineers do better than business areas. In other areas, you should really have close training to what you want to do afterwards.</p>

<p>You should check out the Economics-Business concentration and the Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship concentration at Brown for some ideas.</p>

6

<p>Based on what you’re looking for:</p>

<p>For the best business placement on the east coast, your best bets are Harvard and Wharton. After that, people can argue all day long about Yale, Princeton, MIT, Penn SAS & SEAS, Columbia, NYU Stern, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Georgetown, UVA, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, and others. If you’re not going to HPYW, the college you go to won’t make too huge of a difference in your recruiting and you should go where you will enjoy your 4 years the most.</p>

<p>For urban vs rural, Penn’s campus is one of the urban schools that has the best on campus presence. The campus life is greater than schools like NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, and UChicago where either the city takes over the social scene or (in the case of Chicago) it’s not as fun in the traditional sense of college fun. There are also plenty of restaurants around Penn’s campus and it is 15 minutes from Center City where there is more shopping and food and fun. Also, Penn isn’t unsafe. If you blatantly go out of your way and walk 20 blocks north or west, then yes you are going into not so good neighborhoods. However, I don’t think any students here feel unsafe with their surroundings.</p>

<p>For frats, Ivy frats are different from state school frats. Keep in mind, MIT has a huge frat presence on campus, but I would describe the students there as much less fratty (based on stereotypes) than a school like Williams or Amherst where there are no frats.Look beyond the fact that there are frats and actually at what those frats are like.</p>

<p>For study abroad, I don’t think there are distinct advantages of going to one of these schools over the other for programs. The only advantage I can see from Dartmouth is the fact that it’s on the quarter system and you can go abroad for one quarter, only missing out on 1/3 of the school year instead of 1/2. It also allows you to go abroad two places in one year without being abroad the whole school year.</p>

<p>For what you would study at Brown and Dartmouth (because I’m assuming business at Penn) you’d probably do econ or applied math or something more businessey. I don’t know how much Tuck will influence your academics at Dartmouth. If you can take Tuck MBA courses, you probably won’t be taking a whole lot anyway. At Penn you can take some MBA courses, but it will likely be 4 or fewer. You can take a variety of classes whether you go to Brown, Dartmouth, or Wharton. I have numerous friends in Wharton who picked up second majors in Penn SAS like polysci or history because of their interests. Going to Wharton doesn’t mean you only take business courses for 4 years.</p>

7

<p>Randomly choose one, Dartmouth or Brown, not Penn. </p>

<p>(1) Dartmouth and Brown is more prestigious thn Penn at college level if you care bout prestige.</p>

<p>(2) Dartmouth and Brown are smaller in size, you will have more interactions with caring profs. Penn is just too big, with 20,000 students (college + grad + professional schools). It is 3 times of Dartmouth or Brown.</p>

<p>(3) Both Brown and Dartmouth have better placement record than Penn. Students from Brown and Dartmouth attend better gradute nd professional programs.</p>

<p>(4) Dartmouth students mke more money than Penn students. </p>

<p>(5) Both Brown and Dartmouth students are more interesting.</p>

<p>(6) There are more Penn students on CC. It is a signal that Penn students are not as serious in academics.</p>

<p>Of course, the best way to decide is for you to check out yourself.</p>

<p>I visited Yale and Princeton a couple of years ago. I spent one day on each campus. After my visit to Princeton, I drove to Penn. I spent less than an hour there and immediately knew it was not a school for me. It is hard to describe my feeling. But I had sense right awy: Penn is NOT Yale or Princeton.</p>

8

<p>^don’t take Y7 seriously as he has been ■■■■■■■■ against Penn.
I’m a Penn student so take my biases into consideration, but I have yet to say anything bad about either Brown or Dartmouth.</p>

<p>1) In the business world you’ll be hardpressed to find anyone who says that Dartmouth and Brown are more prestigious than Wharton (actually, many would say Wharton is more prestigious than B or D) or Penn SAS/SEAS.</p>

<p>2) As far as my experiences have been, I’ve had many professors who have taken great interest in undergrads and performed research with a couple professional school professors even though I am a lowly undergrad. The only real advantage of Brown or Dartmouth will be smaller classes for intro courses. Penn has seminars and other small courses that you can start taking your freshman year. It’ll be tough to avoid large classes depending on your major, but not impossible to have several small classes every semester.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Penn does fine in placing students into top professional and grad programs. Penn’s overall numbers might be hurt because nursing students tend not to go to top grad or professional programs, and Wharton touts that it’s undergrad degree is so strong that only 40% of graduates feel the need to go back for an MBA. If they don’t need an MBA, chances are they would have done fine in business school admissions anyway. No reason to part with over 100k and 2 years of foregone salary for a degree you don’t need.</p></li>
<li><p>That’s a matter of opinion. Penn has 10,000 undergrads, so some of us must be somewhat interesting. Right?</p></li>
<li><p>Aside from an alum who graduated ages ago, there are about 5 or so CC posters for Penn who are active. I personally never check this site during the school year and only am on it during breaks. I wouldn’t say that Penn students are any more or less serious about their studies than Brown or Dartmouth students.</p></li>
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Neither is Yale Princeton nor is Princeton Yale. What is your point? You didn’t like Penn when you visited. Guess what, I didn’t like Princeton when I visited. I mainly wanted to go to city schools which is why my top picks were Penn, Columbia, Chicago, Northwestern,and a few others. Different strokes for different folks.</p>

9

<p>OH. MY. ****ING. GOD. Really? REALLY?</p>

<p>“(1) Dartmouth and Brown is more prestigious thn Penn at college level if you care bout prestige.”
According to who? Not true at all. Dartmouth and Brown may have more name recognition among the general population, but that does not correlate to prestige. </p>

<p>“(2) Dartmouth and Brown are smaller in size, you will have more interactions with caring profs”
While at their core Dartmouth and Brown are more undergraduate focused (that is to say, undergrads make up the majority of the schools), that is not to say you will necessarily get more interaction with professors. Just because Penn has more students and more professional schools does not mean professors run out of class the second it is and refuse to see students. Additionally, over 70% of classes have 25 or fewer students and the student-faculty ratio is 6:1. Professor interaction is largely dependent on the student’s own initiative anyway.</p>

<p>“(3) Both Brown and Dartmouth have better placement record than Penn. Students from Brown and Dartmouth attend better gradute nd professional programs.”
Um…I think this has been discussed in 72 other threads at great lengths so I won’t even bother.</p>

<p>"(4) Dartmouth students mke more money than Penn students. "
Just because one or two surveys show Dartmouth grads make ON AVERAGE a couple thousand more dollars a year than Penn grads (and HPYSM grads for that matter) does not mean going to Dartmouth will mean anything for your salary. Again, its going to depend of the students performance in school, ambition, and FIELD. A Slavic Studies degree isn’t likely going to garner a six-figure salary whether you come from Dartmouth or Penn.</p>

<p>“(5) Both Brown and Dartmouth students are more interesting.”
***? Ok, what a completely unqualified statement. Anything to bash Penn I guess.</p>

<p>“(6) There are more Penn students on CC. It is a signal that Penn students are not as serious in academics.”
First of all, I’d like to see evidence of this. Second of all…I guess despite how much you bash Penn, they are more serious about academics than you are because they don’t spend hours a day making pointless threads on CC like you.</p>

<p>" Penn is NOT Yale or Princeton."
And Yale is not Princeton. And neither of them are Harvard. Schools are different. Get over it. Try not to impose your irrational hatred of Penn onto other people who are looking for legitimate advice.</p>

10

<p>Y7ongjun could not be more of a stereotype if he tried. So he didn’t like Penn. So big whoops! Other people will. He’s clearly a very odd bird with his anti-Penn obsession. It doesn’t speak well for his “judgment” indeed, since normal people would just say “Hey, it wasn’t to my taste” and move on.</p>

11

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<p>Have you ever wondered why it is that after spending one hour on the campus and not caring for it, Penn stuck in your craw so much that you devoted upteen threads to trying to prove how bad is it?</p>

<p>Seriously, do you get along with people in real life, or do they think you odd? Because what you’re doing is truly bizarre behavior. Normally, when people don’t like a particular campus, they shrug, realize that everyone has different tastes, if asked they say, “I didn’t care for it” and move on. </p>

<p>Why do you have such a need to convince others to hate Penn, too? What does it matter to you if other people visit Penn and like or love it? </p>

<p>I can only imagine your real life social skills.</p>

12

<p>There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the three in terms of prestige. Ten years ago Brown was unquestionably the most prestigious (“coolest,” “hottest,” or whatever you will). Today it and Dartmouth are about even and perhaps slightly more prestigious (but a whole lot preppier) than Penn, which suffers from its ancient identity as the vocational Ivy.
But Penn has come way up in the world since the 1990s, owing to the efforts of ex-admissions director Lee Stetson, who gamed the U.S. News system perfectly.
For undergraduate business I’d choose Penn simply because it’s the only Ivy with an explicit business major. The other Ivies are snobs about business and employ euphemism, such as Brown’s “Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship.”
As to the selectivity of the three undergraduate student bodies (and your fellow students are the key to your college experience, believe us), there are two principal indicators of selectivity, despite the best efforts of the above-mentioned Lee Stetson to cook the books at Penn.
Indicator 1: Against which universities do you win in the April giveaway-takeaway of shared admits.<br>
Indicator 2: Which of the universities that rank above you in selectivity include you in their major applicant pool overlaps.
Those two, and only those two, are the true indicators of selectivity. Not acceptance rate (it’s easy to drive up the denominator, as Penn and Columbia have done), and not average SAT scores (it’s easy to skim high scorers who are otherwise boring).
So, how do our three schools fare in selectivity?
Indicator 1: The only large-scale study of selectivity yet undertaken is the famous “Revealed Preference Ranking” published in December 2005 by economists Avery (Harvard), Glickman (B.U.), Hoxby (Harvard), and Metrick (UPenn). It was based on a tracking study of 3200 high-achieving applicants. In the competition for shared admits, Brown won 61 percent against Dartmouth and 65 percent against Penn.
The New York Times graphic presentation of the Harvard-Penn study is at
[The</a> New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html]The”>The New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices)
The Harvard-Penn study’s national selectivity rankings were: 1 Harvard, 2 Caltech, 3 Yale, 4 MIT, 5 Stanford, 6 Princeton, 7 Brown, 8 Columbia, 9 Amherst, 10 Dartmouth, 11 Wellesley, 12 Penn.
Indicator 2: Brown occurs in the major applicant pool overlaps of numbers 3, 5, 9, 10, and 11, above. Penn occurs only in number 8. Dartmouth occurs only in number 9. (Source: Fiske Guide 2010, the best edited of the college guides: its applicant-pool overlaps are updated yearly and provided to Fiske by the colleges themselves.)
Finally, addressing the originator of this thread, “xolala”: you won’t get into any of the three schools if you don’t improve your writing. Here is your opening sentence: “I would extremely appreciate if you could tell me the pros and cons of each school as I’m weighing on which one to apply ED to.”
That’s a mess, and not just, I suspect, because you’re typing into a blog. There are infelicities and idiomatic errors throughout your post. Remember, Brown’s acceptance rate this past year was 10.9 percent, Dartmouth’s 12.0 percent, Penn’s 17.1 percent. You’re not going to walk into those places writing prose like that.</p>

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<p>Y7, you are quite the ■■■■■. Couldn’t you at least be one of the witty ones that at least make me giggle instead of just being so obsessed on hating Penn that it’s just kind of weird and uncomfortable for everyone?</p>

<p>I’m in Frankfurt airport on a 5 hour layover (en route from Bombay to Boston) checking CC. Yep, definitely just someone not taking my academics seriously)</p>

14

<p>jimsonweed, looking at the overall selectivity for Penn doesn’t say much about wharton admissions. wharton is more selective than Brown and Dart and its yield beats Harvard’s</p>

15

<p>We visited UPenn this summer. My son loved the school and surroundings. At this point, it is his number one reach school. My other son picked UCLA out of Cal Berkeley. I thought he’d choose Berkeley. It all depends on the individual.</p>

16

<p>since the OP wants to go to business…apply ED to wharton, if you don’t get in, then go to brown/dartmouth</p>

17

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<p>The Revealed Preferences study was not a study of selectivity. It attempted to study desirability of schools among all applicants, and used a method that measured something else entirely.</p>

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<p>The Revealed Preference study found nothing of the sort. Brown’s 61-65 percent victory rate was not in real cross-admit contests, but in “robot cross-admit battles” where the decisions are made by a predefined algorithm, not actual students. The student decisions were used only to calibrate the decision parameters in the algorithm. </p>

<p>Brown’s rating, like that of Wellesley (and even more clearly, Caltech, BYU and Notre Dame) was raised by the study’s ranking method that rewarded schools whose applicant pool is shaped by taste-specific self selection. That isn’t the case for Dartmouth and UPenn and their lower rating doesn’t necessarily reflect lesser desirability. The RP study didn’t release their data, so we can’t say much about the true cross-admit rates or other indices of relative desirability, based on what was published. </p>

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<p>Time to retire that chart from the CC boards. 120 citations claiming it as cross-admit data can’t all be wrong, except when they are. </p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/771599-why-cornell-most-popular-ivy-4.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/771599-why-cornell-most-popular-ivy-4.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Those are not selectivity rankings. Whatever the rankings are measuring, they are subject to a lot of noise within the 1-6 and 7-12 groups; the resampling simulations show that had the study been run again on essentially the same data, there could easily have been some shuffling within ranks 1-6 and 7-12. The only statistically significant finding of the study was the huge gap between 1-6 and the rest. That gap persisted in 99 percent or more of the simulations.</p>

18

<p>wharton is a good undergrad business school, and before going into finance out of college was a dead-end, it was a good option for those who wanted to be ibankers.</p>

<p>however, brown is famous for entrepreneurs, and is famous for launching many very successful businesses right out of the gates (Nantucket Nectures, Brain Gate, Zeo).</p>

<p>here is an article from Fast Company on why Brown students “see green”
[Why</a> Brown Students See Green | Fast Company](<a href=“http://www.fastcompany.com/online/27/seegreen.html]Why”>http://www.fastcompany.com/online/27/seegreen.html)</p>

<p>here is a link to the Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship concentration, that provides great classes and alum connections, in addition to funding for international internships and capstone projects
<a href=“http://www.brown.edu/COE[/url]”>www.brown.edu/COE</a></p>

19

<p><em>bump</em> So between dartmouth and upenn, which would you rather choose?</p>

20

<p>Dartmouth. You’ll have a better time there.</p>