<p>also, everyone know that schools could on using 4-5% of their endowment for a rolling 3 year average every year, so an $800M loss could be $32M to $40M cut for the upcoming year, we have to assume the stock market will be down for the next 2 years and these endowments got into a lot of illiquid investments, so the drop could be a lot worse than the $800M.</p>
<p>MiPerson, if you read this forum a bit more you'll find I already posted where our president stated we're losing 60million from our budget this year, and 2billion is a safety estimation.</p>
<p>Price of Admissions crap is from three presidents ago and lasted for about 3 years. That's precisely in that period where I said our presidents weren't looking at fund raising from the right angle.</p>
<p>I don't know what you mean by "be heard" but as a tour guide with over 125 tours under his belt and who has trained tour guides in the past I can say that many of our tour guides are excellent-- but there are 65 tour guides filled by 180 students who want spots and we can't observe all of those guides all of the time. Sometimes you get a bad guide-- it's hardly representative of a school and if you really want to be a well-informed parent you'd be asking for a lot more than one students 1 hour schtick of which 85% is usually straight from a script.</p>
<p>Our "low endowment" still puts us high on a list of very rich schools. Our alumni giving rate is top notch.</p>
<p>I know exactly what cuts are looking to be made, not just from President's Simmons letters but from conversations with higher ups around campus. If you think that Brown is the only one, look around-- practically all of the top schools are recording 25-30% losses (and Brown's gains over the last 3-5 years outpaces most of our peers). Changes are definitely going to be made, but don't make it out to be the apocalypse because you've read one book, saw a single Brown student on a tour, and went into List Art for an info session (which we use because it's big and no professors wnat to teach in there, so we put our real classes in nicer rooms). Manning Chapel is sometimes used which is much nicer.</p>
<p>The Price of Admissions demonstrates what is true at Brown is true anywhere else: If you are a movie star or, quite rich of course that would make you more desirable. But, the decision to adopt the new curriculum was wholly detached from other considerations -- a fact made plain even in Golden's book. There is a good amount of evidence even within Golden's book that says that the new curriculum was attractive to celebrities. Brown is one of a handful of schools that will treat you like an adult and cut the crap with Gen Ed nonsense. Do people mess up? Sure. Are some choices not the best in the long run? Of course. Welcome to Life!</p>
<p>yes, but at least a college graduate should be able to do second year HS algebra well, I somehow think these Brown admitted celebrity kids struggle with that. I was once with a very famous person who asked her assitant to figure out the 20% tip for the dinnner.</p>
<p>I went to Brown in the mid-70s when the endowment was in terrible shape but nonetheless had a wonderful experience and a fabulous education. What makes Brown unique -- close relationships with professors, academic freedom, the ability to try different courses without fear of being penalized for one's performance, a bright student body with a wide range of interests -- will not change even if the endowment drops. Yes, the dorms might get a little shabbier, the grass might get a little scragglier, but one can still get a fine education and, after all, isn't that what college should be about?</p>
<p>I'll cut to the meat of the issue:</p>
<p>MiPerson, I hate to tell you but you are not as well informed as you claim to be. You have lots of people on this forum willing to help you change that. This is representative of the people of Brown, not the "entitlement" you speak of. That's not to say there aren't some wealthy folk around but they don't represent everyone.</p>
<p>Brown requires four units of math, science, English, and foreign language.</p>
<p>MiPerson, what you're saying is just plain wrong.</p>
<p>Oh, and wolfman is a student, who's a transfer from an underrepresented part of the US, and is much older than most students here. If there's ever been such a thing as an outsider's inside perspective, he has it.</p>
<p>Btw, Jason, a girl working in my lab who's a freshman is from Kansas.</p>
<p>Having survived a few college tours, I think it would be unwise to place much if any reliance on the college tour or the tour guide as an important source of information in making decisions. We had a cute, personable, but rather self-absorbed tour guide at Brown. Could she have been more informative? Sure. Was she fun? Reasonably. Was she entitled? That word didn't even come to mind. Does that mean that all Brown students are cute or self-absorbed? Or is it a piece of evidence that is reasonably uncorrelated with what we as parents want to know? I'd say yes to the latter. I'd also agree that the admissions presentation done in a relatively uncomfortable setting and could have been a lot better, in part because many of the "well-informed" parents asked questions that they could have easily learned by reading Brown's literature in advance. Frankly, I was a little annoyed at the (entitled?) parents who would waste everyone else's time asking questions to which they should already have know the answers if they'd done the least little bit of reading. In addition to having done our pre-reading from Brown, we also read non-Brown evaluations of Brown, websites sampling student opinion, and spoke to students. We attended a class on a Friday morning and he stayed over with kids he knew Friday night and returned Saturday late afternoon. He felt he got a very good sense of the kids when he socialized with them and they left a party and went to a museum and talked about art. He felt that they were intellectually curious and willing to be uncool to pursue learning. He liked the kids he saw. Of course, this was a small sample too -- he didn't hang out with the football team or visit a frat. But, these experiences seem likely to produce more reliable information than a random tour guide.</p>
<p>A) Jason, ask her which city and report back. i had coffee with a girl from KC last Tuesday actually, but most people from KS at Brown are from the KC area.</p>
<p>B) What's so bad about List 120, if you're all talking about List 120...</p>
<p>C) I know a few football players and they are cool people, and a much needed element for Brown to maintain a little normalcy.</p>
<p>still, Brown's very low endowment hurts them, they should have been up to about $6B before the stock market crash, having $2.8B before the crash does hurt a school in the USNWR ranking. Compare this to Notre Dame which has about $6B and same size student bodies.</p>
<p>Everyone needs to realize that 2009 is going to be extremely difficult for private colleges like Brown that have very low endowments.....$2B is not much of a cushion. I wonder if Brown can survive if this economic downturn keeps going for 2 more years. Remember, that donations also dry up during a downturn.</p>
<p>"i wonder if Brown can survive" is a bit overwrought. Founded in 1764, Brown has managed to survive the Depression, Wars (Revolutionary,1812, etc) and the many challenges that will always arise. What matters is the resilience, creativity and values of an institution. President Simmons and the culture of Brown should make one confident that the university will meet the significant challenges ahead.</p>
<p>MiPerson-- how do you know how much Brown's endowment "should" be? Why does USNWR ranking matter when you're still in the top ten for selectivity? From the perspective of the university, isn't all that matters is the ability to pick and choose who you want to be a part of your community?</p>
<p>Brown is not going to fold. 2B dollars still puts Brown very high on the list of the thousands of colleges and universities in the US. 2B was the value of our endowment just 5 years ago and we were surviving then.</p>
<p>This is nonsense and hilarious.</p>
<p>...and ridiculous. You need a dose of reality MiPerson.</p>
<p>no ,"the dose of reality" is when the endowment losses causes schools to switch from "need blind", dramatically reduce the number of PhD candidates (this is already happening, because these schools typically full fund grad school for PhD), jack up the tuition, increase the EFC, lower the academic standards (as Brown did, see 'Price of Admissions") to let in more wealthy kids who's parent's can pay full freight, more adjunct professors, etc....</p>
<p>One thing to be carefull of is that schools like Borwn (an other private top 25), the administration is going to feather their own nest and put the burden on kids and parents.</p>
<p>This recesion is severe, my company is assuming 18 months more of this economic downturn .</p>
<p>Except that Brown has already committed to not changing aid policies to undergraduates, we've stopped increasing the number of PhD candidates in each class but we're retaining the same numbers, tuition is specifically not going to be raised as much as it has recently because we're aware that people can't pay the increased costs, EFC is nearly entirely set by the federal government's paperwork and Brown rarely changes that number unless there are extenuating circumstances (typically business owners who have a lot of equity but not liquid assets), we already don't have a practice of really hiring adjuncts-- there are very few adjuncts or lecturers at Brown because it's counter to our academic philosophy and we'd rather have a worse faculty:student ratio, but considering that we're not firing people and we've increased the faculty by 80 some odd professors in the last 4 years we're not really at risk for that either, and finally, the fact that the major cuts Brown is looking at right now is removing administration specifically-- including administrative support that didn't exist 20 years ago in departments-- everything you're saying is nonsense conjecture ignoring the reality of the nature of the cuts we're looking to make and Brown's priority.</p>
<p>I don't understand how you think you know what Brown's priorities for spending are when your experience with Brown is limited to not liking and admissions info session's room and your tour guide.</p>
<p>Are you going on every board and talking about how you know how they're going to restructure their budget?</p>
<p>Honestly, its outlined pretty clear right now-- graduate stipends are freezing, no more increases in the number of graduate students, expectation of increased aid output and not raising the tuition as much as we'd like because people won't be able to afford it, suspension of major building projects until full capital is raised, hiring freeze even when the positions have already been approved by the dean of the faculty, and a major attempt to overhaul and lower administrative expenditures.</p>
<p>In the mean time, giving rate is barely down, our goal for the largest fundraising campaign in history is nearly met, and we're facing challenges comparable to every other university in our peer group.</p>
<p>There may have to be some radical restructuring, but to say that Brown is in more danger than say, several schools that have recently been fighting to win students by building huge, beautiful dorms at huge expense with deficit spending or schools that depend on large enticing merit aid packages to attract top students... well that's nonsense.</p>
<p>This is going to be very difficult for every single school in the country. State schools have been in SERIOUS trouble for several years now as the public rebels against increased tuition (often by very small amounts in absolute dollars) that these schools have needed simply to survive because the state has cut so much funding in the last 15 years. If you think the situation will not be extremely dire for these institutions, especially as they get even more filled as students turn to public ed as a cheaper alternative, you're nuts.</p>
<p>The problem at Brown is far from a unique one, and having 2B in the bank for 6k undergraduates is a pretty great place to be relative to oh say, 3975 of the 4000 (bs numbers) colleges and universities in the US.</p>
<p>Still top of the heap with money and resources relative to the whole, still in the middle of our peers, still going to survive these pressures as will most schools.</p>
<p>MiPerson80: I've gotta know, after reading all of the back and forth above: What schools did not emit a sense of entitlement large enough to drive your son away? Just wondering what his list of choices looks like without Brown on there.</p>