<p>I hould add that the two kids (brother and sister) I know at Dartmouth (one is a recent graduate), are super laidback, homeschooled in elementary school kids. The son recently graduated and is teaching at a program like Teach for America in Boston. The daughter took a gap year, worked as an au pair the first half of the year to finance time in Africa for the second half of the year. (Sound like perfect candidates for Brown, don’t they?) ;)</p>
<p>GFG- I think one of the enduring legacies of Ruth Simmon’s tenure as President of Brown was to create an infrastructure for kids coming out of disadvantaged backgrounds, i.e. the move to need-blind from need aware and a huge infusion of dollars to make financial aid workable for those kids. One result (the law of unintended consequences I think) is that the PR machine emphasizes the “rich kids” who graduate and go off to do cool things in Central America or save the world from malaria, and the first gen college kids who are going to med school or winning Fulbrights. I think the PR machine (both Brown’s own as well as what the outside media picks up on) ignores the VAST majority of the student body, who end up doing what the graduates of every other similar school do, i.e. entry level corporate jobs, grad school, etc.</p>
<p>Brown has strong Career development/campus recruiting. (and lots of grads in consulting, banking, consumer products marketing, etc. to prove it.) But I agree with you that the hype is about the kids doing something non-conventional after graduation, despite the fact that they are a small minority.</p>
<p>But it is refreshing as an employer to interview a Brown graduate who hasn’t spent four years strategizing on how to get hired as a Master of the Universe. The kids seem to pursue their academic/community service objectives with great gusto-- and then pivot senior year to get a job. A high percentage have loans to pay back- as you realize- and they do it the same way the Dartmouth kids do- by getting a regular paycheck.</p>
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<p>You haven’t met my daughter or many of her friends. Or the many Brown CS grads working for Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Or the ones who went into investment banking. I’m not going to give specifics about my daughter, but she did not major in STEM, is not working for a low-paying nonprofit, and is in fact earning a very nice salary with very nice benefits. </p>
<p>OK, many Brown grads do go into “save-the-world” type jobs. And many are in law school or med school. But if I’m to believe my friend who son recently graduated from Yale, the same thing happens there, too.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth: My kids claim – and I don’t know whether it’s right, but it fits the anecdotal evidence they have based on a dozen or so people who went there – that there is a real streak of anti-intellectualism at Brown. It’s not clear why; maybe it’s that the open curriculum attracts students who are ambivalent about formal schooling. (In my mind, the open curriculum is more respectful of students, and more conducive to real intellectualism, than a curriculum studded with requirements. My kids say that’s probably true, but you have to go to college for a while to understand it.)</p>
<p>It’s not that the people who go to Brown are not smart and successful – on the contrary, Brown is really popular around here, and it gets absolutely first-rate students. A close friend of one kid, perpetually the top student at his well-reputed private school, chose Brown over Stanford (and others). And Brown people are plenty successful after college, too. The Brown alumni we know are mostly making good to outrageous salaries, NOT working for TFA. (And, by the way, out in the world lots of TFA alumni make very nice livings.)</p>
<p>Dartmouth, as many have said, has a great, New England LAC atmosphere. (Dartmouth and Princeton are actually the same size universities. But Dartmouth feels more like Williams, which is much smaller.) A large percentage of its students really never wanted to go anywhere else. That gives it a very positive feeling. It’s somewhat preppier, and more dominant-culture than Brown, but fundamentally it’s full of really smart, thoughtful people who love doing things outside when they can.</p>
<p>One important issue with Dartmouth is that after the sun goes down (which happens mighty early November - February) there isn’t a whole lot to do besides studying that doesn’t involve alcohol or the equivalent. I have known teetotalling students at Dartmouth, but not so many (n=2, and they both loved it). Providence is big enough so there is stuff to do, and Brown is pretty centrally located. (Not that Brown is an oasis of sobriety; it isn’t.)</p>
<p>Well, GFG, you certainly don’t know many Brown grads. Here are the actual facts. For the class of 2012, about two-thirds of grads got jobs after graduation <a href=“http://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/postgrad-data/class-2012-immediate-postgraduate-plans”>http://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/postgrad-data/class-2012-immediate-postgraduate-plans</a> Of those, Of those, 31% worked for non-profits and 60% for for-profits. (Gov’t, a separate category, is 8%.) <a href=“http://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/class-2012-employment”>http://www.brown.edu/campus-life/support/careerlab/class-2012-employment</a> Teach for America was the most common employer with 32.</p>
<p>If you look at the links, you can see a list of employers. </p>
<p>Hmm…interesting. Brown’s survey has an 83% response rate. Stanford does a similar survey. Only 30% respond. <a href=“http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads”>http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads</a></p>
<p>Here is the most comparable survey for Dartmouth I could find. <a href=“http://www.dartmouth.edu/~csrc/docs/12stats.pdf”>http://www.dartmouth.edu/~csrc/docs/12stats.pdf</a> </p>
<p>Its response rate is much better than Stanford’s but much worse than Brown’s. About the same percentage–a bit lower–go directly to work. </p>
<p>And my kid, D '12, is nothing like the D stereotypes being pushed here, either. He liked D, B,<em>and</em> the U of C. He is not politically conservative, a preppy, or interested in investment banking. </p>
<p>When S was applying to college, some people told me that most kids at Brown were seriously into hard drugs. Obviously ridiculous!</p>
<p>Both schools have a variety of students. Visiting is the best option.</p>
<p>The only two Brown grads I know in our city are two physicians who both seem to be very down-to-earth, family-oriented guys. I’ve visited the campus twice and if there are a lot of wealthy kids I couldn’t tell by seeing or talking with them. I know it’s just a Brown marketing material, but these kids seem pretty down-to-earth. <a href=“Brown students are defined by talent and promise... not by financial resources - YouTube”>Brown students are defined by talent and promise... not by financial resources - YouTube;
My daughter is attracted to the school because her impression is that the students are very ‘chill’ with regard to status - intellectual, financial and otherwise</p>
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<p>I think this has historically been true of D, also, unlike some of the other Ivies. Certainly it holds true for the people I knew there back in the 70s and since.</p>
<p>like many private colleges, well over half of students at Brown are full pay. </p>
<p>Of those 2012 Brown graduates who entered the work force, 31% are in non-profits–almost one third. Sounds like a whole lot to me, and explains why all those I’ve met happened to fall into that category. There’s nothing wrong with that–it just depends what sort of career the student is looking for. I looked at Dartmouth’s 2012 career survey to compare, but they don’t break jobs down into profit/non-profit categories. Judging by the categories they do list, my guess is the percentage would be significantly smaller.</p>
<p>At least when S was applying, B was known to have significantly less good FA, which would of course affect the composition of the student body. This was because B had a much smaller endowment.</p>
<p>^Yes, agreed.</p>
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<p>Wow. I’m dumbfounded by this one. That is about the last way I would describe Brown. My daughter graduated in 2011. Based on the many dinners and dorm room conversations we had with her friends, and her reports of what they spent hours discussing – not to mention just about everything else I know about the campus as both an alum and a parent – the total opposite is true.</p>
<p>In fact, before Brown I would never have described my daughter as an intellectual. She was smart, she was creative, she worked hard, but she and her high school friends were not intellectuals. When she went off to college, my husband and I mused over how those four years would change her, because we knew they would. Yet we were surprised that she did turn into an intellectual – she grew to love learning more for the sake of learning than for grades, for example. I think this was one of the true gems of her four years there. (For the sake of full disclosure, Brown didn’t make me into more of an intellectual. I think the students have become more cerebral and introspective since I was there.)</p>
<p>Anyway, totally shaking my head on this impression. I honestly don’t understand where it could have come from.</p>
<p>Well, she will know today…although likely letters from some Ivies are no guarantee of admission to other Ivies. Still, for what is worth, my son also chose between Dartmouth and Brown. Visited both and preferred Providence and the Brown culture more than Dartmouth. Will be graduating this year with degree in biochem and a good job (parents are happy!). Had an amazing four years–stretched himself in many ways. Took advantage of the open curriculum and studied abroad. Yes, there are some wealthy people there, but that is true of many selective schools. Still, all the kids I met seemed very down-to-earth. He also grew to love Providence and will be very sad to leave. I would have to disagree about the “anti-intellectualism” comment earlier up-thread. If anything, I think the open curriculum encourages intellectual discourse. After all, students take classes that they have a genuine interest in taking, not just to fulfill a distribution requirement. I have a ton of discussions with my son about issues of feminism, policy, etc that were fueled by his discussions/classes at Brown. Although I am sure he would have had a good experience at many schools, we couldn’t be happier with how Brown turned out.</p>
<p>Oh, just saw Fire and Rain’s comment about the “anti-intellectualism” Must have posted at the same time. Anyway, I agree!</p>
<p>I agree that these may be the two most different Ivies–my kids both applied to Brown and would have been happy to go there, but neither would apply to Dartmouth at all.</p>
<p>The difference between the ivies is explained here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://home.capecod.net/~tpanitz/ejoke/j20.html”>http://home.capecod.net/~tpanitz/ejoke/j20.html</a></p>
<p>OP, you received two skeptical/negative responses from people who thought it was, shall we say, unbecoming to expect to be accepted at Brown.</p>
<p>Everyone else simply addressed your question. </p>
<p>To characterize that as being heaped with vitriol seems a tad hyperbolic to me. :)</p>
<p>My daughter is currently attending Dartmouth; she is athletic, loves the outdoors, likes to party and loves it there. (I will say that her good friend was sexually assaulted at a frat party there; that is a real problem, and I’m not sure the administration is handling it well, although it may not be much different at other schools). I do not think I would describe the campus as conservative; there are many kids there who are very active, especially in environmental issues. My daughter’s only negative reaction has been to finding out how racist some kids can be–many of her friends are Asian, and there are apparently a fair number of students who feel free to make rude remarks. This may, of course, also be true of other schools, but it was a real shock to her. The new president seems like a great guy; he’s a math professor, not a schmoozer, and his focus, he says, is going to be on the academic experience there.
My son is thinking of applying to Brown, so I am very interested in this comparison. He is definitely more humanities-driven (my daughter is a biologist) and individualistic, and Brown appeals to him more than Dartmouth does, at the moment. We visited last month, and right now it’s his top choice. Whether they think he is a good fit will be another matter. </p>
<p>Dartmouth and Brown are two interesting choices.
If you are lumping the ivy schools together( admittedly applicants often do), one seems to be the most conservative and the other the most liberal.
So how did it come down to those two choices?</p>