<p>I’ve heard that Julia Stiles lived with several roommates at Columbia. Was she ambushed by paparazzi every time she stepped out of the door? I think not, since there are many other celebrities in NYC.</p>
<p>The original version of modestmelody’s statement of Brown’s mission can be found in the 1968 report that gave rise to the so-called Brown Curriculum, since copied explicitly by, e.g., Amherst and Vassar. The Brown Curriculum famously made Brown the hottest college in the country from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and no one who was working in the college placement business during that time will be at all surprised by Brown’s ranking in the “Revealed Preferences” study. </p>
<p>Brown’s selectivity slippage since the later 1990s is owing to its having compromised its identity. Twenty years ago everyone knew about Brown’s student-power curriculum and the education theory that underlay it. Kids were desperate to get in from the age of 12. The “Brown Buzz” attracted an incredible applicant pool of self-starters, and it is that era’s alumni who are today winning all those Pulitzers. </p>
<p>The present Brown administration has without question diluted the Brown Curriculum and blurred Brown’s national image. It has also sneakily grown the undergrad enrollment to 6000-plus without telling anyone, or rather by telling an annual lie about “high yield” even as the actual yield was falling. A 6000-undergrad enrollment required an industrial scale course-registration system (Banner), which in turn introduced very “un-Brown” restrictions. Not in forty years has it been so hard to get an independent study approved. Word of all this has seeped out, the applicant pool has consequently changed, and Brown’s very identity – its brilliantly distinctive student body – is fading fast.</p>
<p>What to do?
(1) Urge modestmelody and her classmates into a independent study of the 1980s Brown culture versus the 2009 Brown culture, and into a new period of activism. While you can still sense what youre losing.
(2) Decrease enrollment by 500.
(3) A moratorium on science laboratory spending: In the sciences, there are forty or so better-positioned research universities at the graduate level, and money spent chasing them in an unwinnable race is money wasted. The next $200 million should be paid into the endowment for faculty salaries in the humanities. Period.
(4) A modest proposal: Give the medical school away. Hand it over to URI. Get out of the bio-medico-pharmaco racket completely.</p>
<p>I don’t see how you can just stop spending on the sciences.</p>
<p>I mean, it’s unwinnable race tomorrow, but who knows what twenty years down the road holds? </p>
<p>I mean, if the right company goes under any one or a number of colleges could absolutely be crippled financially.</p>
<p>jimson-- Again, this conversation really belongs in a new thread, but while I agree with some things you say, I do disagree with your final plans. But as for what should be done-- I’m a graduate student at Brown now, however, I have done considerable work in the area you suggest already. I was a member of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education and the CCC and also one of the co-authors of this article in the post- (page 4-5): [RapidShare:</a> 1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting](<a href=“http://rapidshare.com/files/259084667/POST4.23.09.pdf.html]RapidShare:”>http://rapidshare.com/files/259084667/POST4.23.09.pdf.html)</p>
<p>Oh, and I’m a guy. No worries, mistake happens often on here.</p>
<p>I like the Harry Potters movies and the books. I adore Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson. They seem genuinely nice. IF Emma Watson does go to Brown it wouldnt really affect me at all though …</p>
<p>Now I really wish I was going to Brown…</p>
<p>jimsonweed, I appreciate your constructed thoughts and the position you take on the “big picture” for Brown but do not completely agree on your proposed resolutions. I think a number of current students and alumni would like to hear and contribute to this topic in a thread of its own. I’m happy to bring my little slice of perspective as a mid-to-late 1990’s alumnus and how the undergrad experience then shaped subsequent life off College Hill.</p>
<p>i love how people think that emma is gonna see them walking on a path at brown and be like “hey, will you marry me!”</p>
<p>chill out chances are she will never know ur name lol</p>
<p>Is emma watson really more amazing than the rest of the peeps going to brown? I mean, sure, she’s starred in HP, which was a blockbuster. But from what I’ve seen at ADOCH, pretty much everyone going there is amazing in some way. If admissions didn’t find SOMETHING really really cool about you, would you have even gotten in? In short: if you’re a guy seeking a cool girl, a girl seeking a cool guy, or someone just seeking cool friends, I have yet to notice a better pool of people to do this with than Brown students. Emma Watson’s merely one fish that’s about average for a pond full of awesome.</p>
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That is the way she wants to be treated anyway. :)</p>
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<p>Not exactly. In the study’s statistical model, only some tiers of schools emerge, and the position of schools within tiers is subject to a certain amount of noise. As I recall, the single clearest output of the study was a crisp separation between the top tier (HYPSM) and the next tier (Brown etc); the fraction of MCMC simulations where some second-tier schools were in the first six positions was zero or very close to it. Brown headed the second tier, but it did not have a substantial margin of victory over the next school (Columbia) and in over 20 percent of the simulations Columbia ranked higher than Brown. You could interpret this as “Brown came out ahead of Columbia, but the difference is not statistically significant”.</p>
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<p>The study said nothing about how many percent Brown won in the cross-admit competition. Brown winning 56 percent is in a hypothetical cross admit competition with several observable factors (cost, distance, legacy status) equalized, assuming that the cross-admit decisions were generated by a particular statistical model. The model was chosen for its ease of calculation, not for being a particularly good predictor of student matriculation decisions, so one should assume that this modeling choice itself leads to some noise in the rankings. </p>
<p>Also, the number of students in their sample who were admitted to both Brown and Columbia and chose one of those schools is quite small, and the study does not claim to be a direct reporting of such data. The rankings are an attempt to stitch together thousands of disparate matriculation decisions about hundreds of schools, and the noisiness within the tiers reflects some fundamental difficulty in doing that to consistently produce a linear ranking.</p>
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<p>Much that you say is true, but one should also ask, “compared to what other schools behavior”? Harvard, Stanford and the rest have become commercial enterprises over the same period, and this has had negative effects on admissions and academic quality, even as the flood of US and international applications allows a high “selectivity” to be maintained.</p>
<p>mmm Emma Watson, I’d slytherin her chamber of secrets</p>
<p>@ previous comment. wow…
Dang I wish she decided to go to Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, or JHU. Would’ve made my college decision a lot easier. Say, I wonder if Brown security would let me on campus to get her autograph?</p>
<p>Ray4141 true life man</p>
<p>Ray4141 there is actually a true life episode of MTV starring me and that is the central plot dont worry you will probably see it premiere within a month or two yeah i know it’s pretty chill city</p>
<p>ray4141</p>
<p>that’s disgusting.</p>
<p>@ray4141 ■■■■■ but then again who wouldn’t?</p>
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<p>■■■■■, I have to remember that</p>