<p>It is easy to draw the line. Clinical Professors in the med school are easy to separate from professors who are in the college - they have a different title because they get paid very differently and have very different duties.</p>
<p>No, it's not hard to determine the difference between the two, at all. I went on the Bio department's webpage, separate from the med school, and counted up the professors listed as sole appointments in the department (not joint med school professors). Since our med school and Life Sciences are different departments, and are, in fact, 1.5 miles apart building wise, it's pretty easy to tell who is where. Of course, my count was very quick so I'm sure I could have miscounted +/- a few, but again, that's approximately the count I get.</p>
<p>Flex the number anyway you want, you make the claim that Brown did not have as many faculty members per student as other schools do in popular departments (comparing to schools that routinely have professors who never step foot into an undergraduate classroom, etc), but didn't produce any numbers to back it up. I, informally, did the count at Brown and you, of course, can only back track in your response to "talk to people at the school", which is of course, great advice, but has nothing to do with the "facts" you're presenting. For someone so obsessed with numbers you've got these wrong, or at least, are making them up if you are right because I don't see any source or numbers coming from you on the subject (a rare instance indeed).</p>
<p>MG-- that's of course, in addition to having different names under their appointments, existing in buildings that are located in very different places, having separate webpages for their departments, etc etc etc. It's not hard at all when counting by hand as I just went through and did.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that some schools have single "biology" departments that encompass everyone, while others might have "biochemistry", "forestry", "environmental science", "ecology", "evolutionary biology", "cell biology", "neuroscience", "molecular biology", etc., etc., etc. departments. My point is to just be careful when you do a count because faculty are often categorized in different ways from one university to another.</p>
<p>MM, since you requested numbers, look at the # of history faculty as an example. Brown and HYP have about the same number of history majors and a similar number of students overall (including PhD students), but Princeton & Harvard have over 80 history faculty and Yale has over 100. Brown has about 40 faculty in that area, meaning its "ratio" is about half as good. Swarthmore has a better ratio than just about any University out there besides Yale/Princeton/MIT, since it has many fewer undergrad majors than a larger school but still has a good number of professors (about 10). Meanwhile, UC-Berkeley has about 100 profs, but it has 40,000 students to split them among. All I'm saying about biology is that it is a very difficult field to count, not only because departments have so many different names, but also because so many faculty have affiliations with other schools, and don't spend all their time necessarily teaching undergraduates. It would take a long time to do any meaningful analysis of a department like that, when compared to some others -- not that it is ever easy, given the number of departments that overlap these days.</p>
<p>I didn't count other universities, and in fact went through the departments listed here as non-clinical.</p>
<p><a href="http://med.brown.edu/departments/%5B/url%5D">http://med.brown.edu/departments/</a></p>
<p>27 in MCB (not including research faculty), 33 in EEB, 13 in MMI, 13 in MPPB (again, not including specifically marked research faculty), and 25 Neuro.</p>
<p>That's actually 101 professors. </p>
<p>Concentrators <a href="http://brown.edu/Administration/Institutional_Research/documents/TABLE11.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://brown.edu/Administration/Institutional_Research/documents/TABLE11.pdf</a>
Biology last five years: 143 135 103 134 144
Cog Neuro (note we have a cognitive linguistics department, but I'll leave their faculty out): 8 4 7 16 8
Computational Bio (again, this is like 16 courses in CS and 4-5 in Bio):8 6 3 1 2
Neuro: 61 56 51 58 61</p>
<p>So feel free to figure that out, but the numbers are pretty clear. In neuro, the numbers are a bit above 2:1 student:faculty on concentrators, 4:1 if you want to assume all students (since you're not declaring until after sophomore year). Excluding neuro from our numbers, there are 86 bio professors to about 160 students per year (max, adding a few smaller 1-5 person concentrations), so that's less than 2:1 or slightly less than 4:1 depending on how you want to look at it.</p>
<p>If anyone has any complaints to raise in this area, please let me know, if not step aside.</p>
<p>I was careful posterX-- just because you're surprised how good the numbers are (because you have to back peddle from some earlier claims) doesn't mean it was improperly done.</p>
<p>For a science department, another potential measure to consider is the # of National Academy of Sciences members per undergraduate science major. Those are the people you'll often want to try to do research with before you graduate, if you are interested in cutting-edge scientific research. The ratio of NAS members to the number of undergraduate science majors, actual and prospective across all four years, is approximately 1:1000 at Tufts or Emory, 1:300 at Dartmouth, 1:200 at Brown, 1:80 at Duke or UPenn, 1:50 at Columbia, 1:30 at MIT, UChicago or Stanford, 1:20 at Yale, 1:15 at Princeton or Harvard, and 1:10 at the "gold standard", Caltech.</p>
<p>NAS membership is definitely not a pre-requisite to doing cutting-edge research, and while I think this is no better (or meaningful) metric such as Nobel Laureates (which i think is a poor, meaningless metric as well), it is something to look at. If one thinks that NAS membership is demonstrative of cutting edge research you're letting go of about 80% of what's out there-- all of which is pretty cutting edge.</p>
<p>For instance, Professor Shouheng Sun in Chemistry has the most cited paper of hte last 50 years (since they've started tracking these things) in Chemistry, ever. He's consider the world's foremost expert on magnetic nanomaterials.</p>
<p>Guess what he's not-- a National Academy of the Sciences member.</p>
<p>Sure, that's a great honor, but by no means an effective metric.</p>
<p>NAS membership is highly correlated with world-famous faculty research: ISI/Sciencewatch (which, as the world's most respected source for scientific information, calculates measures such as the "most cited paper" you refer to) says that the top five universities in the United States in terms of cutting-edge scientific research impact (i.e., most citations/highest research quality) are MIT, Stanford, Yale, University of California (UC) at San Diego, and Harvard -- those schools also happen to be among the very top leaders in terms of the # of NAS members.</p>
<p>The next five are UC Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech, University of Michigan, and Duke: also schools with a very high # of NAS members. Notice that you don't see any schools on that list that have a relatively smaller number of NAS Members, such as Tufts, UPenn, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, etc.</p>
<p>Nobel #s are much less important or statistically significant, because there are so few of them.</p>
<p>Another measure would be the # of highly-cited papers per undergraduate science major. Actually, that would be a pretty good one. But my guess, in terms of what it would reveal, is that it would be almost identical to the list of NAS members per undergraduate science major I posted above.</p>
<p>I think a more important metric would be # of citations from papers with undergraduate authorship or number of papers undergraduates have listed with authorship. As an undergrad I think that number would be most meaningful, personally.</p>
<p>this is pathetic</p>
<p>I agree... but sometimes I play the game to see how far I can take it. I like how posterX is shifting from metric to metric. I guess I'm done feeding for now, I really don't want ot argue the point of NAS membership because it's just not worth my time.</p>
<p>more numbers. IPEDS COOL reports the follow numbers of bachelors degrees awarded</p>
<p>Brown
History 102
Social sciences 325</p>
<p>Harvard
History 189
Social sciences 621</p>
<p>I would not call these "about the same".</p>
<p>NAS members per student is an interesting measure, but one has to correct for the wide differences in proportion of students who major in a field that has NAS members. You can't get in the Academy as a poet, for example. </p>
<p>Brown and Yale have relatively low proportions of students in such fields. Harvard, Princeton and Stanford have relatively high proportions, and of course at caltech and MIT that is almost all anyone majors in.</p>
<p>Poster, Are you conceding modest's point about student faculty ratios by department? Or just changing the subject?</p>
<p>He's grasping at straws, is what he's doing. </p>
<p>He can't argue with Modest's point on student faculty ratio, so he's resorted to using a rather pointless method of ranking faculty. Uh...they may have more faculty but our school's faculty are better because a magazine said so! Did you ever stop to think that prestige and quality are not always linked (just look at all the brilliant people or great teachers at reuglar old state schools)? Did you ever stop to think that just because someone has NAS status doesn't mean they can actually impart that knowledge to others, aka teach? Did you ever stop to think that many of those famous nobel laureates and NAS members at places like Harvard, that focus so heavily on graduate research, don't even blink at undergraduates?</p>
<p>PosterX is just SET on discrediting Brown. Why, I can't imagine. But he seems to be running out of ideas.</p>
<p>PosterX uses a kind of debating style that I've only ever encountered in the wild a couple times, and only among really staunch republicans for some reason (that doesn't mean others don't do it, it's just what I've been exposed to; needless to say, democrats at Brown don't have to be on the defensive that often).</p>
<p>I've tried to explain this kind of argumentation to people a few times, but I can never quite put it in words. I do know that it has these properties:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It involves creating maximal doubt without making strong assertions that can be falsified. Things like: "my guess would be..." or "you have to remember to consider..."</p></li>
<li><p>It involves picking and choosing metrics so that, upon being shown that one specific metric is not useful to your argument, you can jump to the next.</p></li>
<li><p>It involves making statements that are essentially opinion or value judgments in the middle of a bunch of factual statements. E.g: "Those are the people you'll often want to try to do research with before you graduate, if you are interested in cutting-edge scientific research."</p></li>
<li><p>This is an important one: It involves making occasional concessions to your opponent in order to give the appearance of full consideration of both sides of the issue.</p></li>
<li><p>As an argument style, it manages to convince dumb people and frustrate the hell out of intelligent people.</p></li>
<li><p>Interestingly, I don't think it ever actually convinces the target audience - it's more like intellectual masturbation for speaker.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Anyone have anything to add?</p>
<p>I have one thing ot add, my undying love for you MG. That's EXACTLY what I hear people doing when I debate (especially conservatives) on issues and it drives me nuts (as you said). It's why I choose not to get involved in a lot of these discussions anymore because I can't deal with it.</p>
<p>Intelligent Design is an area I get this a lot, as well as health care and gun control.</p>
<p>I'm not making any argument, I'm just asking people to do their research. The numbers are never as clear as any of the "boosters" out here seem to claim. An oft repeated claim is that for some reason, even though it is a large research university with thousands of grad/Ph.D. students, and ranked among the top 60 universities in the world (<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/)%5B/url%5D">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/)</a>, Brown is more like an LAC when it comes to undergraduate education. That's true of Dartmouth. But, to put it mildly, it is clearly a much more complicated claim to make when it comes to Brown, particularly vis a vis other Ivy League schools such as HYP that have much larger endowments (as well as, as a result, significantly higher per student expenditures on teaching, advising, research, library services, or any other measure, all posted elsewhere, not to mention lower student-fac ratios), and just as much of a focus on being a research university.</p>
<p>That's not to say Brown isn't a great school - in metrics of undergraduate success rates at getting into the top graduate programs, Brown very often places among the top 15 or 20 colleges in the United States. But to see if it is a "great school" for you - particularly when compared to other top schools - you really need to do your research. Visit for 2-3 days and talk with tons of students and professors. That's all I'm saying here. I am not making an argument or advancing any particular agenda.</p>
<p>"top 15 or 20"</p>
<p>NO. Get it right. Top 5 or 10.</p>
<h1>12 here; top 10 if you exclude the small LACs. <a href="http://www.collegejournal.com/special/top50feeder.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegejournal.com/special/top50feeder.pdf</a></h1>
<p>Although, you should really compare the specific success rates, not just the numerical rank order -- I'd say Brown is actually in a "tier" with nearly a dozen other schools.</p>
<p>Numerous other analyses I have looked at generally place it in the 10-20 range as well, in that specific metric, that is. Beyond graduate school success, you can also look at workforce/career success and from everything I have gathered it would fall among the top 20 in many areas of that as well. </p>
<p>Of course, those are only a few of the many areas of life that are important, but the oft-repeated advice (by many of the nation's most respected educators, not just me!) that you should "go to the best school you can get into" is not to be lightly overlooked.</p>
<p>that link only counted bus/law/med correct? not everyone goes to grad school for those. Brown is not a huge preprofessional school from what I've gathered.</p>
<p>"Visit for 2-3 days and talk with tons of students and professors."</p>
<p>aww, jesus. heeeere we go again. you are also coming up with your own definition of what the "best" college is, and how to come up with that conclusion. ridiculous!</p>
<p>What's interesting, is that posterX is a numbers fiend who goes around trouncing on schools all the time based upon the numbers, a booster himself, if you will.</p>
<p>Read my posts here, you'll see me rarely post numbers-- I think they suck and are meaningless. I'm not boosting anything and am, in fact, often put on the defensive on these forums which there really is no reason to be.</p>
<p>The truth is, the only thing posterX ever contributes to this discussion is numbers, with an off-handed statement about how he likes Brown though and you should visit anyway because he's been caught with his tail between his leg (so he's added that disclaimer in the last month or two).</p>
<p>PosterX, since you've not spend years at Brown as some of the students here, I'd like to know what experience you have that makes you more adept at answering questions about Brown and it's atmospheres than the students on here other than metrics-- other than numbers, what are you contributing? If the answer is nothing, they you're just pushing metrics you think are important.</p>
<p>In fact, the recent trend is not to suggest going to the "best school you can get into" but to go to a "bang for your buck" school where you're going to have just as high success rate among accomplished students with others and costs significantly less.</p>
<p>Besides that, just bug off. It's enough already, we've long ago read all the stats, your opinion, and seen the high horse from which you tout that. People come here wondering about Brownand we're quite well equipped with 5-10 students eager to answer. We don't need your number pushing to "help" out.</p>
<p>::waves::</p>