<p>I agree; however, it is important to remember that there are distinctive "academic cultures", as the essay below illustrates. Don't exclude schools just because you read something here or think (without visiting extensively, as I have urged, above) that they don't represent a particular "academic culture," but on the other hand, don't blindly think that all colleges are "equal" when they clearly are not.</p>
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<p>The relative proportion of Williams alumni who were corporate executive officers (CEOs) of Standard & Poor companies was 1.6 times greater than the proportion of Amherst alumni and 4.6 times greater than the proportion of Swarthmore alumni. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and Service 500 companies in 1990, the proportion of Amherst alumni was 1.25 times that of Williams alumni; Swarthmore had too few to be included in Fortune magazine's analysis. (Yale had by far the highest rate, followed by Princeton.)</p>
<p>In Loren Pope's analysis of the percentage of alumni featured in Who's Who in America, all three schools were very high and closely clustered. Relative to Yale's rate (the highest in the country, here set to 100), Amherst was 56.5, Williams was 54.2, and Swarthmore was 48.2; among the notable schools lower than all three were Dartmouth (44.8), MIT (43.3), Stanford (29.5), Penn (19.1), and Duke (14.9).</p>
<p>The proportion of Swarthmore alumni who earned PhDs in science, math, or engineering was double that of Amherst and Williams; in other PhD fields, Swarthmore's proportion was 1.5 times Amherst's and 2.4 times Williams's. Swarthmore counts several Nobel laureates among its alumni, whereas Amherst and Williams count none. [[my note here-this may be outdated given all the recent American Nobelists]]</p>
<p>Source: Gary Glen Price, UW Madison Dept of Curriculum and Instruction.</p>
<p>PosterX -- your logic is completely flawed. Money does not mean everything. A commitment to undergraduate teaching and the students themselves goes farther than 1 dollar versus 2 in my book. </p>
<p>I'm going to use advising as an example. At Brown, each advisor has around 10 students. 10!! That's unheard of at most places, where several advisors take on the entire student body. Here at Brown I have an advisor and a dean, whom I see regularly. In fact, I can't get them to leave me alone!! Brown's commitment to undergraduates is amazing, and it has nothing to do with money. </p>
<p>"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>Wow, this fact from the 19th century clearly makes Yale superior to other schools...<em>rolls eyes</em></p>
<p>Even though I go to Cornell, and I ultimately got rejected from Brown, Brown still rocks!! I believe that your parents are making a huge mistake. I second that notion that you should try to explain what little rankings are affecting Brown's chances of rising above other schools.</p>
<p>but i find it funny how cornell continues to maintain a higher rank than brown on usnews, even though the two schools' difference of acceptance rate is fairly large.</p>
<p>Brown has a relatively small endowment, but it also has practically no grad school (except for a small med school) to spend that money on. Consequently, the undergrads pretty much get almost all of the money pie, as opposed to a wealthy school like Harvard that has thousands of grad students who need lots of funds. In the end, it's not as if Harvard undergrads have 20 billion dollars more than Brown undergrads. The real numbers are probably much more closer.</p>
<p>That's not really true. First of all, Brown actually has many graduate students. There are many people studying to get their PhDs there. Professional schools have their own endowments, true, but the numbers are not close when you break them out of the overall total endowment used for things such as professors' salaries, libraries, research, undergraduate advising, etc, etc. </p>
<p>Another way to look at it,</p>
<p>Endowment per student
Harvard $1,500,000
Brown $280,000
Difference: 530% higher</p>
<p>Endowment per undergraduate
Harvard $4,300,000
Brown $380,000
Difference: 1100% higher</p>
<p>You are correct that endowment per student is not a great way to compare colleges, but given the enormous differences it is definitely wise to try to figure out what kinds of resources will be available to you as a student. Unfortunately, you won't be able to figure that out by looking at glossy guidebooks... which is part of the reason why so many people say "go to the best school you can get into."</p>
<p>And part of the reason they're wrong. As a chemistry student, there is not one piece of expensive chemistry equipment that exists that we don't have one or more of here at Brown. It wouldn't make a difference if we had a billion more dollars, we still have all we need...</p>
<p>You are obviously correct to some extent. In fact, many of the top small liberal arts colleges like Williams and Swarthmore do almost as well as HYP/MIT/Caltech in terms of placing their alums into the top graduate science programs, even though they have much smaller research facilities and endowments (although, in terms of $/student, they are up there near the top).</p>
<p>Again, visit, talk with dozens of students and faculty -- ask them how the programs are.</p>
<p>If we're talking comparisons, PosterX, the number of grad students at Brown pales to the number at Harvard, Yale, and many other institutions. Why? Brown is primarily an undergraduate institution, which makes me contend that you actually get a better undergraduate education at Brown, endowment be damned. You have yet to provide concrete evidence of critical assets available at Yale / Harvard that are not available at Brown. </p>
<p>And it's not a matter of common sense concerning numbers, i.e. Harvard has more money therefore resources are greater for Harvard students. Show me some proof to back up your claims of how important endowment is. </p>
<p>A lot of it is also how the money is spent. For instance, how much money does Harvard spend on recruiting and advertising, e.g. catering to US News, that Brown spends on its students?</p>
<p>@ClaySoul - I dunno if this is the effect of higher endowment though it probably is but taking a personal example, the size of the libraries of Harvard and Yale are much bigger. Harvard, Yale and even Cornell offer online subscriptions to all of Springer's journals for all years while Dartmouth and Brown only have online subscriptions to Springer journals from 1997 to present which basically precludes offcampus access to the pre-1997 journals. Brown does not have a subscription to journals like Nature Physics, etc. - again not insurmountable obstacles but little things that make life a bit more difficult.</p>
<p>Sid_Galt-- guess what, have you used Iliad? It's never taken me more than 2 days to get a PDF mailed to me or a book mailed to me that was not contained on campus or that we didn't have access to.</p>
<p>In fact, having spoken to the librarian for the sciences, she orders additional subscriptions each year based on what people are trying to get through Iliad so that we don't spend money for the sake of spending and we instead subscribe to those publications that are being read.</p>
<p>I've run into 3-4 obscure things I could not get that I had to use Iliad. The process was painless and automated and the references were QUITE obscure (one of them was a French language chemistry journal from the 50s, for instance). If instant access to a few journals is the difference billions of dollars buys, versus two day access, then I'm thoroughly unimpressed.</p>
<p>I still argue that you have superior resources -- beyond superficial things like who has better access to Nature magazine -- at a school like Brown (or Princeton, or any LAC) where the primary focus is undergraduate education. </p>
<p>For instance, the advising here is incredible, and teacher-student relations are very close. Those are the resources that matter!!! Harvard, Yale, etc, have extensive grad programs and that's where much of the focus and attention goes.</p>
<p>Ooooh look, we have our 800mhz spectrometer in the chem building instead of having it down the road at a facility near the med school at Ship Street cause they're the only ones who ever really need something that strong!!! Yay for having an 800mhz NMR when you only need 300-400 to get great, well resolved spectra!</p>
<p>@modestmelody - I didn't know that I could get electronic articles from Illiad. If you know what articles you want, it's not much of a big deal if you get the article in 2 days instead of instant access.
But if you are for example, browsing the state of the art in a field of which your professor knows little about, instant access is of great help in that case. </p>
<p>Again, I like Brown a lot, but I'm just pointing out that a higher endowment sometimes has advantages which are not just superficial (Although in today's situation, excessive endowment can mean much more focus on grad students than undergrads).</p>