As the title reads, how does the curriculum of Yale and Brown differ? I thought there i no core at both universities and students get to tailor their own education?
Yale has a core, although the university calls them distribution requirements:
http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/yale-college/distributional-requirements/
Brown, for the most part, has no fixed requirements outside of the major (or concentration in Brown parlance).
https://www.brown.edu/admission/undergraduate/what-open-curriculum
Thank you @skieurope
A core curriculum is “the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major” (per Google). Neither Yale nor Brown has common courses required that every student must take in order to receive a degree. Both are considered open curriculum universities.
I just completed my first term at Yale and chose my courses based on my interests, with the distribution requirements like writing and quantitative reasoning being both easy to satisfy and a secondary consideration.
^^ yes, but DS would quickly say that the distribution requirements are easy to satisfy and integrate with your interests, except for that pesky foreign language requirement, which he has pushed off for another semester :))
^ I’m a STEM major and decided it best to satisfy the foreign language requirement in my first term. Funny thing about Yale, though, I really enjoyed the course and now want to take another =D>
^^. DS enjoyed, well enough, his first semester of French, L3. He wanted to take “a semester off.” It appears that he will take 3 semesters off 
. Just last night he tried to read something in French, and had difficulty.
Although L3 was well-taught, and arguably better-taught than some of the CS courses (his major), the subject matter is so orthogonal to his interests that he finds other courses that he feels driven to take instead. There’s quite a time commitment involved, because FL is not his strong suit, and it’s tough scheduling with pset-heavy classes.
He’s not too stressed about it. First world problem, granted. :))
OP, I would put Brown at one end of the continuum and Columbia at the other. Yale would fall much closer to Brown than Columbia.
Thank you both for your valuable input! @cttwenty15 @IxnayBob
The distribution requirements at Yale are pretty easy to meet, and there are no required courses. It’s funny, depending on a student’s interest, the requirements in other areas are sometimes tedious. I am reading IxnayBob about his son and the language requirement. My D on the other hand is now deciding to add German as a second major to her Lit major and is currently taking Korean. None of this was on her radar screen before she got to Yale.
She did however, find it hard to get a quantitative class (Geometry of Nature) and a social science class that she liked. But, the Blue Book had many classes to choose from so she was not steered toward any one class to meet the requirement.