<p>Coola-- ignore the people who say dumb things. That's what I should do-- I'd be happier.</p>
<p>Brown has a higher yield than Duke for a reason. Brown absolutely kills Duke in the cross admit battle. If a superior student's choices for a top tier school is between Brown and Duke, Brown will get that student over 60% of the time. This has always been the case and nothing has changed in any of the recent admissions cycle. As for endowment per student, there is no more specious metric in ascertaining institutional quality than this one. There is the well-known case of a Brown undergraduate who transferred to Harvard and then transferred back to Brown again. Reason? Lack of access to undergraduate resources at-Harvard. Yes the Harvard that supposedly has 1,500,000.00 to allot per student. Let me make a bold assertion here. Brown is the absolutely finest undergraduate school in America currently. Only Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale are remotely close.</p>
<p>A bold assertion indeed.</p>
<p>Paging Drs. Williams and Amherst...</p>
<p>I like to think like Pinderhughes, with a few more colleges on the list from the LAC stuff, although I do admit having a university-college does pose some pretty big advantages to the typical LAC model for a physical scientist such as myself.</p>
<p>I dno if we "kill" Duke as asserted, and I do think there are many reasons to go there and it's a fine school. It's a very different place than Brown and many students who were happy at one may not like the other so much.</p>
<p>No we KILL Duke! Cross admits attend Brown 78% of the time.</p>
<p>Also, Pinderhughes I completely agree that currently Brown is the best undergraduate university in America let alone the Ivy League. In fact, when US News ranked national universities by the quality of undergradute education in the 90's Brown came in second after Dartmouth.</p>
<p>
[quote]
when US News ranked national universities by the quality of undergradute education in the 90's Brown came in second after Dartmouth.
[/quote]
why oh why did they have to change it :(</p>
<p>Source? .....</p>
<p>^^^^^^
dionysus,
if i remember correctly, brown was actually #1 for several years, perennially up there with dartmouth. go back into the us news archives at your schools and look at the early- and mid-90s rankings. i'm not sure if they called it their "quality of undergraduate program rankings," but they basically stated that whatever it was they were measuring, this is what it equated to (quality of undergrad education). i remember them distinctly, as my guidance counselor kept shoving them in my face back in the day. </p>
<p>also, before us news heavily weighed "faculty resources" (of which salaries play a huge role) in their overall rankings, brown was consistently ranked in the top 10 of national universities. </p>
<p>btw, posterX - just because a school's endowment $/student is high does not necessarily mean that its UNDERGRADUATE students are seeing that money or benefitting from it more than a school with a lower endowment/student ratio.</p>
<p>"Also, Pinderhughes I completely agree that currently Brown is the best undergraduate university in America let alone the Ivy League. In fact, when US News ranked national universities by the quality of undergradute education in the 90's Brown came in second after Dartmouth."</p>
<p>yea do you have a source for that?</p>
<p>AdOfficer-- I'd in fact make the claim that endowment/per grad student is a very decent indicator of graduate school resources whereas endowment/undergrad is simply not.</p>
<p>Here are two other ways to look at it. If you look them up, you'll see that they mirror endowment per student in most cases, but not all. In either case, Brown (and other research universities with similar resources per student such as Penn and Cornell) are far behind HYP/Caltech/MIT. </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Research expenditure per undergraduate science major, and/or per student.</p></li>
<li><p>Student to faculty ratios in the most popular departments for undergraduate majors, either on a per-undergraduate-major basis or on a per-undergraduate-student basis. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>Endowment per student definitely isn't the only measure, but in the case where there are wide gaps between two institutions (e.g., one with $2,000,000 per student versus one with $100,000), it is a pretty good predictor of a lot of things. The size of the endowment almost always has a lot to do with what kind of money is available for advising, fellowships, tutoring, quality of housing, special teaching programs, number of teachers available at any given time, and even dining hall food. Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do your research, but don't "under-do" it, either.</p>
<p>OP,</p>
<p>I think you've been misinformed. Northwestern isn't among the ones known for stats manipulation.</p>
<p>So, let me put forth these numbers for PosterX to digest. In the physical sciences, which arguably use the most and bring in the most grant money at many universities, here are Brown's numbers on faculty to concentrators each year:
Chemistry: average of 10 concentrators per year, 25 faculty members
Here is 97-06 numbers:
13, 10, 5, 8, 7, 5, 10, 5, 7, 13
Physics: average of 10 or so also (I'm eyeballing), 25 faculty members
6, 10, 3, 13, 12, 9, 3, 10, 7, 11
Engineering: 52 faculty members, concentrators:
87 66 99 87 76 67 59 51 52 46, plus BME — — — — — 6 8 18 19 15
Computer Science: 29 faculty, 50-60 each year
54 57 52 73 63 73 76 56 40 37</p>
<p>Those are pretty good numbers.</p>
<p>Also, I just counted 95 professors in the various biological sciences department, and here are Bio's concentration numbers, which is hte most popular concentration at Brown:
190, 208, 204, 155, 160, 143, 135, 103, 134, 144
+ biochemistry
23, 27, 13, 18, 11, 9, 10, 4, 7, 11</p>
<p>to posterx and the other non-believers of Brown's superiority here's the scource.</p>
<p>Part of the reason the rankings areas they are is because if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn't come out on top as people expect there would be no trust in the guide. Since perception is that those are by far the best schools, and overall they may be, I never can make a case other than what worked well for me, there would be widespread cynicism and skepticism towards rankings that don't express that.</p>
<p>The truth is, if the rankings aren't designed ot make things look as most people think they should they wouldn't be considered valid.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Brown has a lower admit rate, higher SAT's, but it gets killed on stupid statistics like "Faculty Rescources", where other schools just manipulate all they want. And then, Asian parents won't believe that it is true, and then call their kids useless for going to a (GULP!) number 15!!! school. God damn, do something Brown, do something. Because schools like WashU which are notorious for number manipulating might actually steal the nation's top students, and then they would get better unfairly.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>God, this is exactly the attitude I hate, and I hope Brown sticks to its guns. I lived in an Asian country for a few years and there was this really, really clear pecking order about which school was number 1, number 2, etc. And the thing is all I ever heard anybody say was that if you got to the higher-ranked school you just had to go there because your life would go entirely better and no one ever would deviate (it seemed).</p>
<p>And so I went out with this really attractive woman who had gone to the number 1 school, but it turned out she declared her major as Forestry, something she actually had no interest in. She wanted to do that because it enabled her to enroll in the number 1 U. (It turns out it was easier to get into certain depts. than into others).</p>
<p>I think there are good and bad things about US News rankings, but on balance I think they bring us closer to the above-exemplified kind of thinking. And frankly that makes me sick. </p>
<p>If you can't work with your parents to convince them about Brown, I feel for you. On the other hand, though, my respect for Brown has gone up even further by learning that they may have a relatively laissez faire attitude about USNWR. Bully for them. Everybody knows it is a first-rate institution, one many people would definitely attend over most or at least many of the supposedly higher-ranked schools.</p>
<p>Also, the premise of your question is that the other schools are dishonest in the numbers they supply and that Brown should be too. That's pathetic, I am sorry.</p>
<p>How is the fact that the woman you dated is attractive relevant??</p>
<p>I have tremendous faith in Brown, but I also have to defend it to people who dismiss it as the "dumb ivy" or some annoying **** like that.</p>
<p>Brown may not have the superlative amount of financial resources found at a small handful of schools. Even still, I would be utterly stunned to find the same level of accessibility and commitment to undergraduates as I have found at Brown.</p>
<p>coola no i was not serious just expressing my feelings toward duke. i dont really give a &^*&^ about you spending time to prove something, lmao</p>
<p>All in all, I think Fred is right. btw, hi Fred. This thread is a bunch of hair splitting and watermelon seed spitting. Nothing more than hot air by the naysayers.</p>