<p>And one more thing, addressing the original topic here. </p>
<p>Aiming for a better US News ranking is not always a good thing. </p>
<p>I went to Tulane for a year where the administration was obsessed with their ranking. Tons of money was spent on publicity and advertising and making the school "look better," instead of actually making it better. They spent more time clammoring for a better ranking than they did actually caring about the students. Which approach ultimately makes a university better? I think the answer is clear. </p>
<p>Just look at Reed. No one can debate the incredible academics at Reed, but because Reed doesn't play US New's silly little game (they don't provide US News with information), they don't even crack the top 50 of the LACs. If you know anything about it, you know that it is one of the top 10 in the country. At least top 20.</p>
<p>And don't raise the grammar argument in front of me. It's silly, and usually more ignorant than you realize. I am a linguist, and I will rip you to shreds :-)</p>
<p>Hey MG, don't worry about copping out and becoming a lawyer. That's the decision we make after we live a few years in the fantasy world that is higher education. At least, ideally...</p>
<p>I wish I were copping out and going to law school, but right now I'm thinking grad school... ugh.</p>
<p>Thanks for the completely irrelevant grammar critique, Hi Power.
I didn't realize that posting on an internet forum=writing a formal English paper.</p>
<p>Getting back to the topic at hand, the reason why I didn't respond to anything specific in your post was because there simply wasn't anything worth responding to. You continue to base your assertions purely on 1) US News Rankings (which are flawed and worthless) and 2) Your own skewed and uninformed ideas about certain colleges' "reputations." If you can provide some tangible facts or evidence as to why Brown is inferior to all of the other Ivies, I'm sure we'd all love to hear them. Let me remind you that anecdotes are not facts.</p>
<p>"Brown's placement into top graduate/professional programs rivals that of Columbia/Dartmouth and surpasses that of Penn and Cornell."</p>
<p>But what about the Brown degree by itself? Not as a platform for a professional program elsewhere.</p>
<p>I'm not going to respond to any of the other posts on here because I'm just ruffling feathers without generating any useful discussion. Simply, my question is, why do you all choose Brown? It doesn't appear to have the academic recognition of other Ivies so there's got to be other reasons.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But what about the Brown degree by itself
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The Brown degree on its own will get you as far as a Columbia/Dartmouth/etc. degree and one could argue that it's just as good as a degree from Yale or Princeton (Harvard gets the exclusion here as I'm not sure how powerful that name is in the end). The point is, employers know Brown is an excellent school - it's been that way for a long time. If you're wondering about job placement, you can do the research. The average salary of Brown grads, when compared by field to other top schools, is comparable. The Brown name will get you far.</p>
<p>"But what about the Brown degree by itself? Not as a platform for a professional program elsewhere."</p>
<p>I don't see how the two can be separate. I mean a degree is invariably judged by, among other things, by grad school placement. Grad school placement is somewhat correlated with the level of intellect of the student body, which is in any case a result of the education that that particular university/school has provided.</p>
<p>Most students at Brown, and other elite colleges, go on to get advanced degrees. So grad/prof school placement is relevant for the bulk of the class.</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread. I will start by stating that I have extraordinary respect for Brown; it is indeed an amazing educational institution and superb environment for undergraduate education. In terms of focus and resources, only Yale, Dartmouth and perhaps Princeton match it.</p>
<p>There have been alot of posts re endowment per student, particularly from Poster X (who I generally like, mostly because I like Yale). Poster X though misleads in a crucial area:</p>
<ul>
<li>endowment per undergrad needs to be adjusted when doing comparisons.</li>
</ul>
<p>For example, Harvard has a $30 billion endowment, but the "College"/ undergrad portion of that is ~$10 billion. It's a huge number, but that's what you compare to other schools. You need to factor out Harvard Med's $3.5 billion, the B-Schools $2.5 billion, Law's $1.25 billion, etc. Yes, the undergrads get some benefit from the larger endowment (libraries, athletics, etc.) but lets do apples to apples. Ditto for Yale, Penn and Columbia. That will bring funds per student to a more relevant comparison, where Brown won't suffer quite so much.</p>
<p>Likewise for faculty per student. I suspect Harvard, Penn, Columbia etc all have their enormous med school staff numbers included in the faculty numbers for US News; that deflates their student/faculty ratio, hurting places like Brown and Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Brown is a phemomenal place --> who really cares what US News says. Certainly not the record breaking number of applicants last cycle.</p>
<p>^Agreed ..... however, on student-fac ratio, you really should look at the #s in the most popular departments. Take the number of undergraduate majors in a department, then take the number of faculty. You can also account for the number of PhD students in a department if you want, but that's less important. Be careful in making your comparisons since sometimes faculty are joint appointments, but generally you'll get an accurate figure. I call this the "true" student to faculty ratio. Calculate it for the most popular departments (econ, English, history, psych, polisci, bio) where you'll likely take the majority of your coursework and where the majority of students choose to concentrate, but also calculate it for departments in which you are very interested, e.g., engineering, or perhaps art history, linguistics, etc.</p>
<p>You'll see that the top LACs, generally speaking, have lower student to faculty ratios than all but the very top universities by this measure - namely Princeton, Yale, UChicago, Harvard (in some, not all areas), and of course, Caltech (which is almost always an "outlier"). Of course, it varies depending on the departments you look at -- for example, at MIT you would get great numbers for some of the humanities fields -- but if you strictly take the most popular ones, those schools are easily at the top, probably because they have such large endowments per student. Meanwhile, many universities -- particularly places like UC-Berkeley, UW-Madison, Texas, etc that relatively speaking have very low endowments per student -- have student-faculty ratios that are much worse than any of the top LACs or top universities. Schools like Cornell, Tufts, Brown and UPenn, that don't have nearly the endowment per student as the "big guys" do, generally speaking fall somewhere in between. However, again, it does depend on the department somewhat.</p>
<p>That's a fine measure, PosterX, if you account for the fact that not all faculty at Harvard are teaching undergraduates. FWIW, Brown's most popular concentration, biology, has about 95 faculty members and 141-166 concentrators in the last 5 years.</p>
<p>It's 141-166 concentrators per year. You should look at the ratios for all the students, not just the number concentrating each year. </p>
<p>Also, for areas like neuroscience or biology, you should be particularly careful about counting medical school professors, perhaps by only counting the ones who teach courses or advise undergraduates, or counting them as a fractional number. </p>
<p>If you take the ratio at Yale or Harvard and count medical school faculty, for example, you would end up with ratios of something like 2000+ faculty for 150 undergraduate majors.</p>
<p>ClaySoul, it's hard to draw a clear line between the two. You have to look at what courses are taught and the availability of professors in general. The only way to determine that for a field like biology, in addition to looking at the course offerings and relevant faculty relative to the number of concentrators (and students, since non-majors also often take courses in areas outside their major!), is to visit and talk with as many students and professors as possible.</p>