I HATE how Brown doesn't cater to US News Rankings

Colleges and Universities A-Z Brown University
81

<p>That HYPS are more "preprofessionally oriented" than Brown. Brown sends just as many if not more of its alumni on to law, business, medical, etc., school as HYPS do. It's true that they generally don't go to professional schools that are quite as highly ranked as the ones alumni of HYPS go to, but they do get into excellent ones and go in large numbers. </p>

<p>By "preprofessional" you also probably mean that there are relatively fewer students going into intellectual subjects. Yet if you look, for example, at the list of the percentage of alumni who eventually go on to receive Ph.D.s in the humanities (eventually, not necessarily right after they graduate), you'll see things may be different than what you might expect if you expect HYPS to be "preprofessional". In fact, you'll notice that Yale, Harvard, and UChicago are the top three universities in the country in this "intellectual" ranking.</p>

<p>Rank -- College -- Index of alumni population eventually receiving a Ph.D.</p>

<p>1 St John's College (Annapolis, MD) 4.24
2 Reed College 3.71
3 Yale University 3.20
4 Bryn Mawr College 3.01
5 Bennington College 2.98
6 Swarthmore College 2.65
7 Thomas Aquinas College 2.44
8 Oberlin College 2.44
9 Wesleyan University 2.41
10 Amherst College 2.39
11 Haverford College 2.12
12 Carleton College 1.98
13 Harvard University 1.90
14 Bard College 1.77
15 Wellesley College 1.74
16 University of Chicago 1.72
17 Columbia University 1.71
18 Princeton University 1.65
19 Goucher College 1.61
20 Lawrence University 1.61
21 Grinnell College 1.61
22 Mount Holyoke College 1.60
23 Smith College 1.55
24 Knox College 1.52
25 Pitzer College 1.50
26 Brown University 1.48
27 College of Wooster 1.47
28 Barnard College 1.47
29 Vassar College 1.39
30 Beloit College 1.39
31 Agnes Scott College 1.38
32 University of the South 1.38
33 Pomona College 1.34
34 Centre College 1.33
35 Kenyon College 1.29
36 Williams College 1.27
37 Chatham College 1.26
38 Antioch University, All Campuses 1.23
39 Brandeis University 1.16
40 Dartmouth College 1.16
41 Wheaton College (IL) 1.16
42 Sarah Lawrence College 1.15
43 Scripps College 1.13
44 Stanford University 1.11 </p>

<p>(Gary Glen Price, UW Madison Department of Curriculum and Instruction)</p>

82

<p>I would say that Brown's reputation as such though comes from the fact that we don't offer any preprofessional education (other than the med school and our public health concentration) to undergraduates. I don't know number on students who are going into business and law, but I'd imagine that removing premedical students, that Brown does send less people percentage wise into those three fields directly from undergrad.</p>

<p>Again, I'm not sure about comparison wise, but I can say that Brown as a university does not feel that undergraduate education (or education in general) should be used and viewed as job preparation and values education on an intellectual, academic approach and level and attempts to foster that value in students who don't already have it. In fact, I think that Brown would ideally like ot accept only students who feel that way as that is the type of student Brown is talking about when they seek a good fit.</p>

<p>Who knows how this plays out number wise? I'm not sure, the PhD stat is interesting, but not that telling pretty much from 14-38 on the list, and I'm sure the numbers can easily be varied and even "explained" based upon what disciplines these students are getting PhDs in and how that stacks up to popularity of that discipline at a school, etc etc. There are a ton of other stats that are worth looking at as well.</p>

<p>Again, I'm not sure comparison wise, but I can tell you that generally pre-professionalism is looked down upon here and that's probably where the perception comes from.</p>

83

<p>I think the list heading should be:</p>

<p>Rank -- College -- Index of alumni population eventually receiving a Ph.D. in the humanities</p>

<p>The numbers are way too low to be overall.</p>

84

<p>"I'm not sure comparison wise, but I can tell you that generally pre-professionalism is looked down upon here"</p>

<p>It's looked down upon by people everywhere. That doesn't mean a lot of studnets don't end up taking job offers in finance, etc. Look at the numbers. Brown is just as preprofessional, if not more, than Harvard or Yale. I've spent a lot of time at Brown, and I don't think it is noticably different, except for the fact that, unlike HYP, it isn't 100% need blind for all admitted students and therefore isn't as socioeconomically diverse (particularly among int'l students), which may contribute to the sense of "laidback" among certain cliques.</p>

85

<p>Well, PosterX, a couple of points. One, cool your ****in pits. Number 2, we've been need blind for several years now. Three, you constantly assert yourself as having a ton of experience with Brown when coming on this forum, I'd like to know what experience that is that you seem to think your voice about what Brown is like is somehow more accurate than actual Brown students.</p>

<p>I've visited many places, have friends in many places (which, if your elitism transfers into real world from the forums here may not be the case with you... you need to calm down), but all of my experiences are anecdotal at best so I try not to make sweeping statements about other schools. You seem to have no qualms about that...</p>

<p>And again, I'm only stating my personal observations and explaining where that perception comes from, not vouching for it's validity. Your tone and desire to edit my post to a single sentence to respond to as though it has no meaning is unwarranted and ridiculous.</p>

<p>Do you think you do the community on here a service by responding the way you do to people?</p>

86

<p>I'm just getting the facts out there. I am not making sweeping statements - you're just reading things wrong. My opinions are just worth whatever value you assign to them, which is probably very little, except for my opinion that you shouldn't listen to Brown students or other people on this board: rather, you should visit each potential school for 2-3 days, attend weekend parties, eat in 5 different dining halls, sit in on a half dozen classes and talk with as many students and faculty as possible before reaching your own conclusions. Brown is a fantastic university, in terms of getting its alumni into the very top graduate schools, for example, it is certainly among the top 15 or 20 in the nation.</p>

<p>Let's look at whether your statements are accurate, regarding Brown being need blind for ALL students. Facts:</p>

<p>"Brown meets full demonstrated need of all admitted students who have applied for financial aid. Financial aid for foreign citizens, however, is limited.... Beginning with the Class of 2007, Brown implemented a need-blind admission policy for all US citizens and permanent residents."</p>

<ul>
<li>Brown Website, 7/3/07</li>
</ul>

87

<p>posterx - why do you suppose, Stanford scrapes the bottom of the "intellectual" list?</p>

88

<p>Why you ask me? My feeling is that it just isn't as intellectual as Chicago, AWWWS (Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Williams, Swarthmore), HYP, or Brown. Not that it isn't at all - it's among the top 40 or so of how many schools out there, after all? But, see my post above, regarding how I feel about opinions :)</p>

89

<p>The listing is for undergrads, and the big research universities typically have better grad schools than undergrad schools, which tend to have larger classes than the small colleges, and tend to have TAs (who generally have little interest in teaching as a career) leading the sections. Professors at the small colleges tend to have more time for undergrads, nurturing intellectual endeavors.</p>

90

<p>posterX: "you should visit each potential school for 2-3 days, attend weekend parties, eat in 5 different dining halls, sit in on a half dozen classes and talk with as many students and faculty as possible before reaching your own conclusions."</p>

<p>adofficer:</p>

<p>"very true, but most people on cc continually make sweeping generalizations about institutions they do not attend or have only spent 2-3 days at while visiting, in addition to putting other institutions on particularly high pedestals..."</p>

91

<p>I generally agree, vossron. However, there are a couple of mid-sized universities, namely HYP, that actually have better resources and lower student-faculty ratios than any of the top LACs. Other than HYP/Caltech/MIT/Dartmouth, you're almost always off going to an LAC, in my opinion.</p>

92

<p>well if it's your opinion then im jumping on it!</p>

93

<p>posterX, you are talking out of both sides of your mouth now. don't preach that prospective students should visit schools, attend parties at them, sit in on classes, etc..., to find the right place for them and then continually make value judgements about institutions that YOU DO NOT ATTEND. just because you have visited friends attending another schools DOES NOT make you an expert. you have a very limited view of many of the places you have mentioned in this thread (brown, stanford) and in others. you have had limited experience in higher education in general and are not in a position to be making the broad, sweeping generalization that you make. </p>

<p>a second point: your use of phd productivity here is really shady. you have selected to use statistics that put, drumroll please, yale on top. that's not to say that yale isn't impressive with respect to phd productivity, because it is. but across ALL disciplines, yale is 10th; princeton is 12th; harvard is 22nd; brown is 29th. and if you look at the difference between 10th and 29th, it isn't that huge (just like in us news and world report's rankings!). this is all, by the way, from the higher education data sharing consortium - where most institutions get their information on the baccalaureate origins of phd productivity.</p>

<p>also, i find it interesting that someone who has spent so much time trying to prove the superiority of one or a handful of institutions using phd productivity has failed to acknowledge something glaring: look at the people in this country with doctorates - namely those teaching in our "best" universities. up until VERY recently, they have all been very similar. how? they have almost exclusively been white men. let's be honest here, posterx. traditionally, hyp have served a very minute portion of our population, and until very recently, diversity has not been a priority, particularly socioeconomic diversity. these schools traditionally served white, upper class men until it became politically and socially irresponsible to only do so. currently, these schools are socially conscious and aware, but it hasn't always been like that. should it be to anyone's surprise that these institutions have more alums going on to doctoral level work than other universities - particularly over those that have had a history of inclusion (like brown, for example)? btw, amongst the nation's highest ranked universities, princeton and yale have the fewest blacks on their faculties in the ivy league and rank amongst those having the fewest amongst the highest ranked schools in the country; they have fewer than vanderbilt, northwestern, duke, chapel hill, washu, johns hopkins, and cornell and many others. brown ranks fifth in the country, behind emory, columbia, chapel hill, and michigan, with the most blacks on its faculty. source: journal of blacks in higher education</p>

<p>this brings me to one last comment...your quip that brown "...isn't as socioeconomically diverse" is simply ridiculous. brown went need-blind in 2003; hyp did it first...though not terribly long before brown did. with respect to student of color population, brown is on par with princeton, harvard, and yale. enrollments in the freshman class change year to year at each, but they all pretty much have around the same percentage of students of color enrolled (30%, though harvard has a wee bit less than brown, princeton, and yale - look at petersons.com or each school's websites). in terms of economic diversity, if you look at the number of pell grant recipients, for example, at these schools, you will see that brown and yale have practically the same percentage of recipients in their classrooms (around 10% of their student bodies), while princeton and harvard have by far the fewest in the ivy league (7.4% and 6.8%, receptively) and amongst the highest ranking schools in the country.</p>

<p>SO, let's not make sweeping generalizations, and let's not use data selectively to prove one's point. and let's not make assertions that cannot be backed up with facts. and finally, let's not continue to talk about how one of these schools is better than all others. we love the schools we attend (or have attended) usually...otherwise, we wouldn't have elected to attend them.</p>

94

<p>AdOfficer, please post the data that you mentioned on PhD productivity. Although interesting, it might not account for students who start their PhDs several years after they graduate, in the same way that the ones I posted do. </p>

<p>Regarding exclusivity, I agree with your general point about a lack of opportunities for certain populations in this country, but not your specific data from JBHE or how you extrapolate that to infer an unusual level of historical exclusivity. For example, the first African-American in the United States ever to get a Ph.D. degree graduated from Yale in the 1870s with his B.A. (ranking sixth in his class of over 100), then got his Ph.D. from Yale in Physics - becoming the first African-American ever to get a Ph.D. in any subject, from any university, as well as only the sixth American to get a Ph.D. in Physics. The first Chinese citizen ever to graduate from any American university got his B.A. from Yale over 20 years before that.</p>

<p>Regarding Pell Grants, those don't tell you the whole picture by any stretch of the imagination, although I'm happy to hear that Brown is as good as Yale in your measure, and better than Princeton and Harvard. What I was referring to was Brown's status with regards to international students. Unfortunately, Brown is not need blind for international students and as a result, its international student population is, in my experience, noticeably wealthier than the population at HYP or Caltech.</p>

<p>Anyhow, I'm glad we both agree that EXTENSIVE visits -- for a minimum of 2 or 3 days, including a weekend -- are the only way to find out if a school is truly right for you. Regarding people's opinions, as I said above, they are to be taken with a grain of salt no matter who they come from. Someone who is a current student at one school may have a more or less valid opinion on things than someone who has just visited and spent time at hundreds of different universities around the world, depending on your point of view. I think we can both agree to qualify our statements and to try not to make sweeping generalizations like the ones in your post above.</p>

95

<p>Ten years of data, courtesy of interesteddad, <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4132560&highlight=phd#post4132560:%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4132560&highlight=phd#post4132560:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Percentage of PhDs per graduate</p>

<p>Academic field: ALL</p>

<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>

<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database</p>

<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period
Note: Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law. </p>

<p>1 35.8% California Institute of Technology<br>
2 24.7% Harvey Mudd College
3 21.1% Swarthmore College<br>
4 19.9% Reed College<br>
5 18.3% Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br>
6 16.8% Carleton College<br>
7 15.8% Bryn Mawr College<br>
8 15.7% Oberlin College
9 15.3% University of Chicago<br>
10 14.5% Yale University
11 14.3% Princeton University<br>
12 14.3% Harvard University<br>
13 14.1% Grinnell College<br>
14 13.8% Haverford College<br>
15 13.8% Pomona College<br>
16 13.1% Rice University
17 12.7% Williams College<br>
18 12.4% Amherst College
19 11.4% Stanford University
20 11.3% Kalamazoo College<br>
21 11.0% Wesleyan University
22 10.6% St John's College (both campus)
23 10.6% Brown University<br>
24 10.4% Wellesley College<br>
25 10.0% Earlham College
26 9.6% Beloit College<br>
27 9.5% Lawrence University
28 9.3% Macalester College<br>
29 9.0% Cornell University, All Campuses<br>
30 9.0% Bowdoin College
31 8.9% Mount Holyoke College<br>
32 8.9% Smith College<br>
33 8.8% Vassar College<br>
34 8.7% Case Western Reserve University
35 8.7% Johns Hopkins University<br>
36 8.7% St Olaf College
37 8.7% Hendrix College
38 8.6% Hampshire College<br>
39 8.5% Trinity University<br>
40 8.5% Knox College<br>
41 8.5% Duke University
42 8.4% Occidental College<br>
43 8.3% University of Rochester
44 8.3% College of Wooster<br>
45 8.3% Barnard College
46 8.2% Bennington College<br>
47 8.1% Columbia University
48 8.0% Whitman College
49 7.9% University of California-Berkeley<br>
50 7.9% College of William and Mary
51 7.8% Carnegie Mellon University<br>
52 7.8% New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology<br>
53 7.7% Brandeis University
54 7.6% Dartmouth College<br>
55 7.5% Wabash College<br>
56 7.5% Bates College<br>
57 7.5% Davidson College<br>
58 7.2% Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute<br>
59 7.2% Franklin and Marshall College<br>
60 7.1% Fisk University</p>

96

<p>Where's UPenn?</p>

97

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4164190&highlight=Penn+phd#post4164190:%5B/url%5D%5Bquote%5DThere"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4164190&highlight=Penn+phd#post4164190:
[quote]
There</a> are plentiful examples of colleges and universities with super high admissions selectivity that don't produce particularly large percentages of PhDs. For example, Duke and Dartmouth and UPenn have extraordinarily high median SAT scores, but do not produce PhDs. at high rates: Duke only 41st per capita; Dartmouth at 54th, Penn at 65th. Meanwhile, there are some schools with much lower admissions stats that easily outperform that (Kalamazoo, Earlham, Beloit. etc.).

[/quote]
</p>

98

<p>my data is from the higher education data sharing consortium (heds)...institutions who share their data in the consortium get reports on themselves and all other institutions that share data...it's not open to the public. however, if you do a search for heds, you will see that many institutions publish their results (and how they compare to other institutions) on their websites in annual reports. these vary slightly from vossron's (or interesteddad's), most likely because heds institutions typically use alumni questionnaires for their data while IPEDS and NSF are talking directly to those with the degrees when they obtain them. </p>

<p>heds findings from 1992-2001</p>

<ol>
<li>CalTech</li>
<li>Harvery Mudd</li>
<li>Reed</li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Carleton</li>
<li>Oberlin</li>
<li>Bryn Mawr</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Grinnell</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Haverford</li>
<li>Cleaveland Institute of Music</li>
<li>St. John's College</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Pomona</li>
<li>Kalamazoo</li>
<li>Amherst</li>
<li>Juilliard</li>
<li>Williams</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>New England Conservatory of Music</li>
<li>Shimer</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Wesleyan</li>
<li>Peabody Instititute at Johns Hopkins</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Beloit</li>
</ol>

<p>when the first black student or asian american or latino student graduated from harvard or yale is not an argument to prove that these institutions have not historically restricted access to their campuses. first of all, these populations were admitted in MINUTE numbers, and much to the chagrin of the leaders, currents students, and alumni of these institutions. read marcia synnott's the half opened door or karabel's the chosen...these places were not inclusive to any minorities, be they black, asian, latino, jewish, catholic, etc..., at the undergraduate or graduate level. there was systematic exclusion of these groups, even up to the 1950s and 1960s. </p>

<p>with respect to being need-blind for international students...hyp haven't been on this block for too long...</p>

99

<p>There is so much I could say but I'm glad others are having a good time with this. It pleases me that other people have hooked onto posterX's desire to bring the world statistics which are the only set valid to him, and despite him recognizing are a terrible measure of a university, numbers that are worthy of being constantly thrown around on here.</p>

<p>I'm not sure why, PosterX being a Yale student, feels the need to come on the Brown board in any discussion of rankings, reports, or just comparisons, but I guess he feels he's helping someone out. I could be wrong, but I don't find him/her to be adding much when he/she pops up... I'll let others decide.</p>

100

<p>These weighted bac origin PhD figures tend to vary over time, so if you look at different time points, you will get different rankings. Similarly, one must make an assumption about time to degree. Different assumptions change the results.</p>

<p>Before getting too carried away, remember that these colleges differ substantially in the distribution of fields in which students major. So some have a large proportion of students in areas that do not often lead to PhD's. Penn is probably an example, with relatively few of the Wharton contingent headed for doctoral degrees. Others have a more professional focus, and students who get advanced degrees go to professional school rather than grad school.</p>

<p>Kind of silly to argue about which is the better college. May make sense at the tailgate party before the football game, but in real life there is no way to reduce the transition from teen to adulthood, process of becoming an educated citizen, and figuring out the next step in life to any single number on which colleges could be rated. The experience is so much an interaction between the individual, the college, and the other students, that "my college is better than yours" almost immediate devolves into trivia, or wildly unsupported assertions.</p>