@sunnyschool maybe it’s different now, but i can speak from personal observation in 05-09 that some of the NYC private school kids never branched out and just hung out with each other.
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?id=217156 says that Brown students are 52% no-FA (approximately top 2-3% income/wealth) and 15% Pell grant (approximately lower half income/wealth).
Midwest public flagship schools (but use caution with the no-FA numbers, as they are not directly comparable due to lower in-state list prices):
Illinois: 51% no-FA, 21% Pell
Indiana: 41% no-FA, 15% Pell
Iowa: 40% no-FA, 19% Pell
Michigan: 49% no-FA, 15% Pell
Minnesota: 46% no-FA, 19% Pell
Missouri: 40% no-FA, 20% Pell
Ohio State: 33% no-FA, 20% Pell
Wisconsin: 59% no-FA, 14% Pell
If you are in the lower half of the income/wealth distribution, your kid may find that the great majority of other students at Brown or a midwestern flagship come from wealthier families. But the no-FA group at the midwestern flagship may not be as wealthy as the no-FA group at Brown, due to the lower in-state list price that many at the midwestern flagship are paying.
@ucbalumnus isn’t Brown’s aid more generous, thus 52% vs Illinois’s 51% is apples and oranges?
@iwannabe_Brown I wasn’t trying to be offensive. I don’t think most college educated parents can rattle off all the Ivy League colleges. Most don’t even know Brown is an Ivy League school, thus most certainly don’t comprehend how difficult it is to get into.
Can you elaborate on social dynamics? I worry the lower and middle class students are excluded from mixing with the wealthier NE/NYC peers.
Why are you concerned what others think?
Yes, that is part of why caution must be used when looking at the no-FA percentages (the other part of the reason is that the public flagships’ list prices are lower for their in-state students).
The “most” that “don’t know what Brown is” or “don’t know it’s Ivy League” must not be very educated on colleges. Ivys are all taking more lower income students now. If you’re not convinced it’s a great school and think everyone in the NE is snobby, then I’d let the spot go to the person that is dying to go there.
I wasn’t offended. I genuinely laughed. If you’re talking about bumper sticker prestige, yes, it’s far from Harvard. If you’re talking about grad school or employer prestige, it’s laughable to think Brown’s prestige is regional.
I said “some” for a reason. Plenty of kids from the NYC and boarding school scene branched out (myself included - I couldn’t get away from that scene fast enough). The middle income students are definitely fully integrated with the upper income ones. I would say no one consciously makes friends based on SES but if you can’t ever afford to go to the movies with your unit mates or go out on Thayer I think it increases the chance of feeling like you’re on the outside.
For many students, a university like Brown will be the first time a kid encounters people from vastly different SES. It seems like many low income students have no conception of the kind of wealth some people have and are truly angered/baffled by what they see or are surprised to see that not everyone who is wealthy flaunts their wealth and wants nothing to do with “the poor.” For many on the other side, it’s realizing how privileged you really are. Coming from the NYC private school scene, I thought I was upper middle class because I didn’t grow up on park or 5th ave like many of my peers, using a car service for anything was considered way too expensive while that replaced the school bus for some, and similarly first class flights were too expensive (let alone private - one of my classmates for his 16th birthday took 5 friends with him on a private plane to Disney World for a few days and his parents footed the bill for everyone). It seems ludicrous to those from the outside, but my universe was so skewed that it didn’t even occur to me that the very fact that my parents could afford to send me to private school in NYC automatically put me in the 1%. Let alone full pay students, the ivy league is so expensive that there are plenty of kids on partial scholarship who have no idea how close to the top of the income ladder their families actually are until they find out their roommate isn’t going home for thanksgiving or winter break because they can’t afford the trips to/from Brown.
Wrong assumption. Many of the tech companies in California and Seattle hire a lot of Brown grads – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
No more so than any of the other Ivies and the smaller LAC like Williams and Amherst. Ever hear of Princeton’s Eating Clubs? Plus Brown accepts kids from wealthy boarding schools nationwide – several from Harvey Westlake in LA, for example, and those kids don’t know the NYC kids or the NH kids or the Atlanta kids. Another large group of students come from magnet schools like Stuyvesant, and they are usually not the wealthy types.
Anecdotally, when my daughter was at Brown, the kids who “cliqued up” were more the sons and daughters of entertainment celebrities. My daughter – who went to a small rural public school and comes from an upper middle income family – had no problem meeting friends and fitting in. She was friends with people from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, although none of her friends were Bill Gates rich or dirt poor. But I do know some dirt-poor kids who went to Brown – including one who was homeless in high school – and they loved Brown and I never heard them complain about the snotty rich kids. It was an adjustment and a struggle for them, yes.
Brown, as well as the other elite schools, has spent the last few decades working very hard to diversify its student bodies. It’s a lot harder for those wealthy prep school kids to get in these days (I have a friend who went to a very prestigious NYC prep school, and he often talks about how easy it was for his classmates to get into the Ivies compared to today). Brown is very concerned about the fact that its student body skews toward the two ends of the socio-economic curve (wealthy and poor) and is trying to improve its financial aid to attract more middle-income students.
Brown has more than 6000 undergraduate students. There may be cliques, but they are inconsequential to most students who can find friends among these thousands of kids.
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There are a few dorms in need of serious repair, or possibly total demolition. The classrooms are in good shape, and one of the oldest is going through a major renovation right now. In general, some of the worst at Brown is still better than what I’ve seen at some public colleges. There’s a parent on here who has kids both at Brown and Harvard, and she rates her son’s Harvard dorm as more dilapidated than anything at Brown.
The average person on the street has heard of Harvard and Yale, and the big sports schools, and their local colleges. There are people in New England who don’t know about Brown, just like there are people in California who have no idea what Pomona is and people in Ohio who know nothing about Oberlin. But hiring managers and grad school admissions offices most definitely know about Brown, and that’s really all that matters. If your kid goes to Brown and gets a good job in Chicago, do you care if the administrative assistant never heard of Brown?
This is definitely what I’m calling it from now on.
For those who want a great dorm, you might want to try Princeton’s Whitman College. The 250,000-square-foot residential complex is for just 500 Princeton undergraduates, The price came in at a very steep $136 million back in 2007. But you might be depressed there. The Daily Princetonian survey found almost half of students report feeling depressed. The finding is so shocking that the school has since taken down the article from its website. But you can still find the discussion in here (http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/1497933/the-daily-princetonian-survey-finds-almost-half-of-students-report-feeling-depressed/).
In case you have WSJ login, here is the Whitman College article – https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119067974691738128
You have seen me using “pressure cooker” term often. I did not invent it. The Daily Princetonian article starts by quoting someone saying “this place is a freaking pressure cooker”.
I work for a large west coast tech firm. We send people to recruit from Brown every year. When we interview people, the Brown name definitely is recognized.
However, I have people who graduated from Brown, Duke, Stanford etc. on my team, as well as people from Clemson, UWashington at Seattle, UWashington at Tacoma, Texas, TAMU, North Dakota State, etc. After a year, you can’t tell the difference between the guy from Clemson and the gal from Brown. After 10 years, the most distinguished guy, surprisingly, is the guy from UW Tacoma.
This point has been emphasized many times on CC: a prestigious college opens the first door; after that, it doesn’t count much.
Oops. Harvard Westlake. Been reading too many MeToo stories, I guess.
I am by no means philosopher. I believe the meaning of life is the journey, not the destination. For someone who really wants to talk about destination, from that perspective, I win Steve Jobs. Although he is much more richer/successful but he is already dead. Another example is travel. Once come back from a trip, it is the memory/experience which matters, not the souvenirs. People who only care abut the end results probably would never go anywhere because there is no result once they come back from a trip. Future accomplishments depend on the person, not the school the person went to. But the Brown experience is definitely different when compared with other schools. Each school gives their students different experiences. There is only one college experience. So choose wisely.
In another thread, I have quoted the following paragraph …
“A last truism: it is often said that there is a college for everyone. That is certainly true. What is more elusive – but equally true – is that there is a right-fit college for everyone. But most kids and their parents never find that school because they are too caught-up in trying to get into the “best” school rather than the right school.”
Some pre-med talks again. If you understand what Japanese future doctors might need to go through, you would think it is better to do medical school in US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVSCTOIXBUs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbq_YNPdL8E
If one doesn’t know what makes a college “right,” you don’t go on what the neighbors think. You dig into what the college shows, the classes it offers in the interest areas, professor strengths, requirements, what some show about post grad successes. Plus activities, etc. Not assumptions. Not some idea regionalism is blind to other parts of the country.
Whether a (prestige) college is worth it is a whole lot more than what the guy down the street thinks. Most folks only know sports big names.
And this idea rich boarding school types dominate is…well, I think some are too certain there’s something wrong with those kids, they can’t be just as nice and academic as public school kids. An open mind helps.
It definitely helps that it’s first in any alphabetical listing of the Ivy League.
@midwestahm I think Brown is not seen as prestigious as most other ivies and elites because it doesn’t have many top departments, and specifically grad school departments which are usually the source of prestige for universities. Also it has the smallest endowment in the ivy league which probably limits, in comparison to peer schools, the major projects they can undertake in transforming the school and in raising awareness through major marketing campaigns etc. In all fairness however, few random people in the midwest would be able to recognize any ivy past HYP. Brown has great undergraduate teaching quality and a very open, flexible curriculum and liberal grading prolicy which are all plus for many. Also it sends many students to top jobs and grad schools after graduation. It does have the least socioeconomic diversity of all the ivies according to a recent study from the NYT and is the most liberal ivy by far so keep this also in mind too when deciding. Still I wouldnt call Brown elitist by any means. I have friends who attended and I think people are quite down to earth and friendly actually.
https://thetab.com/us/brown/2017/01/26/brown-students-richest-ivy-league-3477
It is funny that so many people choose their “best” school based on grad school reputation and it just happens that these days prestige of universities is decided by grad school reputation. If I can make one suggestion to Brown to increase its endowment, it would be to have a new business school and/or law school. Without a law school or business school, it is hard to have a big endowment. At Brown, $112.5 Million is the amount of need-based scholarship budgeted for the 2015-2016 year, which is not too far behind Yale’s $128 million on undergraduate need-based financial aid in the 2016-2017 academic year. The “right” school for different person is going to be different. It is funny that every year in April, a bunch of uninitiated posted a lot of “choose between XX and YY” on CC and in the end, they all went to the “best” school. Why ask in the first place? Different schools have different culture, different strong departments, different grading system and different student life. I have posted enough mental related links here for schools which are supposed to be the “best” schools. If you go to a curved grading system school and someone tells you the school is not competitive, it is a big lie. You basically have to kill the guy who sits next to you in exams to get an “A” and those who got killed are likely to have mental problems. At Brown, everyone can be successful as long as you are doing well. I have been wondering why on a relative base Stanford and Princeton have lower percentage of pre-med applicants. If you have better answers, please let me know. My guess is a lot got weeded out by their low grade.
@TheOldTimer: honestly, I’m quite glad that Brown doesn’t have a large business/law school. The focus on undergrad education was one of the main things that drew me to Brown in the first place.