Question about BROWN University/ and school rankings in General

College Search & Selection
41

<p>Stanford: Much better campus, better weather, more prestigious (I feel dirty saying that, but its true), the people there are better (much more friendly, less elitist, less "cliquey", and less snobby in general than those attending ivy league schools), and I like San Francisco and Palo Alto more than Providence RI.</p>

<p>I was hoping you'd mention reasons like these. These are all very subjective factors and do not correlate to the overall quality of a school. I personally love Stanford and am going to apply there too, but maybe someone else finds its campus too spread out and doesn't want to bike to class everyday or hates the architecture, lives in the NE and doesn't want to go across the country, etc. </p>

<p>The point of this thread (and the countless other ones that have sprung up in the past few days) was to argue about Brown's academic strength and you brought up very subjective arguments. </p>

<p>and you comment on the humanities versus the sciences was correct. Humanities degrees are easy in comparison to science majors.
I'd have to disagree with you there. It's all about what you're good at. You were right, I do get A's in physics and history, but there are people who struggle with names/dates and making historical connections but who are good at deriving equations to solve a physics problem for example. </p>

<p>*
why do you like brown so much?*</p>

<p>Many reasons, really. I'm pretty unfocused in terms of my interests and Brown seems like the perfect place to explore. Also, it has a very intimate feel that I like. The students seem very happy there, and why shouldn't they? Brown has Great academics, nice campus, interesting student body, etc. Also, Providence is nice. It's decently sized and if you want to go somewhere bigger, Boston is only an hour away.</p>

42

<p>
[quote]
Ha. Actually, undergrad institution does not even matter for getting into grad school. Last year, my white cousin graduated from Ripon college (a 3rd tier liberal arts school according to USNWR) in wisconsin with a 3.9 GPA, and a 40 on her MCAT. She's going to Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine now. Her best friend who also went to Ripon also got into Johns Hopkins. I realize that this is only 2 people, but it goes to show that it does not matter where you went as an undergraduate. You can still get into just about any graduate/professional school if you have good grades. There is no need to blow so much money and go into debt for an undergrad education.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Anecdotal evidence like this does not mean much, the raw numbes are against you. Sure awhile back my Dad went to University of Maryland and then to Stanford for law school, but you know what? He was the top of his class and the first person ever to get into Stanford from there. So its not typical for your friends or anyone for that matter. Personally, I would rather get into the best undergraduate school I can, be around smart kids, and then if I choose to have an easier time getting into a great grad schools. The best grad schools get most of their kids from the best undergrad schools, coincidence? I highly doubt it.</p>

43

<p>"She's going to Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine now. Her best friend who also went to Ripon also got into Johns Hopkins. I realize that this is only 2 people, but it goes to show that it does not matter where you went as an undergraduate."</p>

<p>It may show exactly the opposition - that Ripon prepared these two students extraordinarily well for medical school, better in fact than schools that are supposedly in tiers above it.</p>

<p>What did the Johns Hopkins Med. School folks know that USNWR (and folks who subscribe to it) do not?</p>

44

<p>"The best grad schools get most of their kids from the best undergrad schools, coincidence? I highly doubt it."</p>

<p>First, you have no evidence to support this. Second, even if you are right, it could just be because more smart kids tend to go to the best undergrad schools, and would have gotten into a good graduate school no matter where they went.<br>
Bescraze, you are the type of person I hate most about these forums. You believe that no one can do anything well in life unless they go to a prestigious undergrad school which is laughable. You go around screaming about things that you have no clue about. There are hundreds of success stories like that of my cousin's. Probably even more than those who went to expensive, big named undergraduate schools.</p>

<p>Mini- Ripon has a typical pre-med program. There is nothing special about it. My cousin just did well in a relatively inexpensive college, performed well on her MCAT, and reaped the reward of being admitted into arguably the best medical school in the country. I have no doubt that luck played a part, but she certainly did not get in because of the prestige of her college.</p>

45

<p>
[quote]
Bescraze, you are the type of person I hate most about these forums. You believe that no one can do anything well in life unless they go to a prestigious undergrad school which is laughable. You go around screaming about things that you have no clue about.

[/quote]

thats funny I was thinking the same of you. The kind of kid who swears by his opinion, when the logic is clearly wrong. Not to mention he proves a hypocrite in insulting and berating a fantastic school, aka Brown.</p>

46

<p>You think Brown is fantastic only because of its Ivy League Status and USNWR ranking. You NEVER look past that.</p>

47

<p>Brown is fantastic because it does incredibly well at placing its graduates into top grad schools and top jobs. Its reputation is strong, and its undergrad focus is superior to a vast majority of its peers. Its selective and tightknit, meaning a strong and intelligent alumni network. These are things that matter, not graduate ranks. Brown does much better than some schools ranked ahead of it, such as JHU and WashU, at almost everything that matters.</p>

<p>As for the Ripon example - sure there are outliers. But check out this list of Harvard and Yale Law (the two best in the country.) Top schools dominate. Adjusted for size, places like Brown, Dartmouth, and Amherst greatly overperform.</p>

<p>Harvard Law School
2006-2007 # of Students Undergraduate Enrollment
Harvard 241 6,715
Yale 113 5,303
Stanford 79 6,391
Penn 57 9,730
Princeton 54 4,775
Brown 48 5,798
Cal-Berkeley 48 23,863
Columbia 46 5,593
Cornell 45 13,523
DUKE 41 6,259
Ucla 39 25,432
Dartmouth 35 4,005
Georgetown 32 6,587</p>

<hr>

<p>Yale Law School
2005-2006 # of Students Undergraduate Enrollment
Harvard 89 6,715
Yale 86 5,303
Stanford 42 6,391
Princeton 34 4,775
Columbia 18 5,593
Brown 17 5,798
Cal-Berkeley 16 23,863
DUKE 13 6,259
Dartmouth 13 4,005
Williams College 12 1,965
U of Virginia 10 13,440
Amherst 9 1,648</p>

48

<p>JHU bombs Brown out of the water in every single academic field out there. What school do you go to and what radical claim can you make about JHU's alumni networking and relations. All of the schools ranked among the top 15 are selective, tightnight, place graduates well into top grad schools and top jobs, and have very tightnight intelligent strong alumni networking. What ae you to differentiate such miniscule differences among the T15 universities.</p>

<p>Back up your claims about JHU. Graduate ranks typically transcend into the graduate level. Discrediting graduate ranks when undergraduate ranks are unavailable is pure nonesense. Gaming the system to fit whatever advantage you want by disclaiming rankings or facts that do not give you an advantage. That is despicable.</p>

49

<p>That's Law school, where grade inflation reigns supreme in determining admission. Brown is the king of Grade Inflation, and I know for a fact that law school does not take deflation or inflation into account when evaluating applications</p>

50

<p><a href="http://wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Here's more data. Undergrad ranks are meaningless for graduate admission and elite jobs similarly are not concerned with them. That's why places like HYPS, Columbia, Dartmouth, etc dominate elite recruiting and MBA placement while having no undergrad B-schools. IT DOESN't MATTER. Similarly its why the top LACS (Amherst, Williams, Swat) do so well at graduate placement.</p>

51

<p>I think slipper just owned everyone....
I particularly liked this
ale Law School
2005-2006 # of Students Undergraduate Enrollment
Harvard 89 6,715
Yale 86 5,303
Stanford 42 6,391
Princeton 34 4,775
Columbia 18 5,593
Brown 17 5,798
Cal-Berkeley 16 23,863
DUKE 13 6,259
Dartmouth 13 4,005
Williams College 12 1,965
U of Virginia 10 13,440
Amherst 9 1,648</p>

<p>It seems that swimguy is trying to use every excuse in the book and their failing. Guess what if Brown has such grade inflation and can do that well on law school placement, why would I remotely care?</p>

52

<p>Yup, Just because you don't like Brown's position on that list, strike USNews out and refer to another source that puts Brown at a higher more comfortable level.</p>

<p>If you are really that insecure about Brown's position, you could at the very least give credibility to what USNew tres to achieve or what the undergraduate ranking aims to acquire; a comprehensive apples to apples overview of undergraduate schools based on subjective and objective data.</p>

<p>Brown is an undergraduate school afterall with a primary purpose of education, not sending students to high salary jobs. Its intent and mission is just like all others, cultivate knowldge and learning. If you wanted a school that had excellent results with placing students in high caliber position, go to a school that built specifically for that purpose.</p>

<p>He didn't own everyone. He didn't believe the merits of USNews, thats his deal. Everyone has their own different interpretations of what is more valueable or what is not. He placed values on WSJ report, doesn't mean he owned everyone. He was insecure on Brown's position and lacked a defensible argument for why its that "low" on that list. Thats his interpretation, it doesn't neccessarily mean that thw WSJ owned everyone. I put zero weight on WSJ report, so it has no bearing on me whatsoever. lol :)</p>

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<p>I don't want to go to law school.</p>

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<p>Reasons why we can't just look at professional school placement data:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>The WSJ ranking is absolute garbage. Their definition of "Top 5" is rather dubious with an obvious bias towards Northeast schools (and hence the corresponding undergrads). Why is Columbia and Yale Med considered "Top 5" when they're ranked nowhere near the top 5 in US News? What makes them better than Penn Med or WashU Med (which are actually ranked in the Top 5)? Is it any wonder why Yale does better in WSJ's rankings than Penn or WashU? Why the heck is Stanford not considered a Top 5 law school? A much better ranking would incorporate the top 20 medical/business/law schools to get a larger sample size.</p></li>
<li><p>You have to control for the difference in the quality of the student body. In other words, if Harvard and Yale already start out with the best students, is it any wonder their students are the most successful? Brown graduates SHOULD do better than Cornell graduates because Brown students are, on average, smarter than Cornell students when they entered college. What did the school add?</p></li>
<li><p>This may shock some people but not everyone aspires to get into i-banking or med school. Some schools are more pre-professional while graduates of other schools aspire for grad school or no additional schooling at all. For example, Johns Hopkins and Harvard each produced 320 med school applicants last year while Penn (a much larger school) only produced 350 applicants. Yale only 225 and MIT only 187. Cornell has a large architecture, hotel management, and engineering student body (with entire colleges devoted to those respective subjects). Why would you include all of those students in the calculations? Without knowing how many people actually want to go into the professional fields, such data as slipper has posted is useless.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>People make such a big deal out of placement rates. In reality, a student's success in getting into law or med school is almost entirely dependent on the student. Any top 20-25 school can offer the resources for a student to get into law or med school. Brown and Dartmouth don't have any magical formulas that Duke or Penn don't.</p>

55

<p>Also from the WSJ site:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Traditionally, college rankings have focused on test scores and grade averages of kids coming in the door. But we wanted to find out what happens after they leave -- and try to get into prestigious grad schools.</p>

<p>We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.</p>

<p>Our team of reporters fanned out to these schools to find the alma maters for every student starting this fall, more than 5,100 in all. Nine of the schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on "face book" directories schools give incoming students. Of course, when it comes to "feeding" grad schools, a college's rate is more important than the raw numbers. (Michigan, for example, sent about twice the number as Georgetown, but it's also more than three times the size.) So our feeder score factors in class size.</p>

<p>How did colleges react to our list? Some were quick to point out that it was only one year of data, and many said they didn't track their feeder rates closely. "I have no way of verifying this," a spokesman for Cornell said. Others said they didn't think this was an important way to judge schools because so many factors play into grad schools' decisions. Still, the colleges in our list did not dispute our findings and neither did the grad schools.</p>

<p>Not that they necessarily want it out there. "We keep a lid on this data," says Mohan Boodram, director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard Medical School. Otherwise, "high-school students will think they have to go to certain schools.

[/quote]
</p>

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<p>The WSJ study is seriously flawed because it looks at so few professional programs (5 each in law, medicine, and business) that it seriously skews the data. It does suggest a more serious study that someone could do: take a broader cross-section, say 15 or 20 top law, medical, and business schools, and look at where their students got undergrad degrees over the course of several (say 3 to 5) recent admissions cycles.</p>

<p>I have no doubt Brown would do very well in that survey. It's a quality school with quality students, and its graduates come out well prepared. Top law, medical, and business schools know this. They are concerned with GPAs and standardized test scores, but when it comes to a choice between two candidates with similar "objective" credentials, they'll go for the one from the stronger school just about every time.</p>

57

<p>What baffles me is that some members here actually take thw WSJ pretty seriously. In fact, the WSJ rankings is taken so seriously in fact that the WSJ rankings even outweight the USNews undergraduate ranking. :-p </p>

<p>There is a difference as Norcal pointed out, as to whether or not the product (high end jobs, great placement) is the result of a great undergraduate progam that teaches you the knowledge, skill set, and tools you need to succeed or just having high caliber students to begin with. It depends on the individual of course, it does fit very well with what you said, quality of the student counts.</p>

<p>In this case, Brown is not the primary factor that these graduates go out and outperform everyone else, Brown gives it an extra name boast to the employers who first seek out these schools (as well as just as many as 25-30 other schools on their recruitment list), its the students that carry themselves through this process. Brown has high caliber students going in, high caliber students going out. Its not like Brown is an accept all loser school and crunchs academy award winners like Norcal pointed out lol. If it did, Brown would be a even more ridiculous school. (In the good sense of the word)</p>

58

<p>The thing is that the WSJ data is echoed in every single top school I've seen that publishes undergrad enrollment. On my Columbia MBA list, pretty much the same. Sakky has published the HBS and Wharton lists, same trends. I would ask someone to prove ONE counter-example.</p>

<p>I would argue that Dartmouth and Brown DO things Penn doesn't. More attention from professors for one. Dartmouth spends 3!! times as much on advising and undergrad grants than Penn, Columbia, and Cornell (COHE). Undergrad focus has its benefits.</p>

59

<p>
[quote-slipper1234]
The thing is that the WSJ data is echoed in every single top school I've seen that publishes undergrad enrollment. On my Columbia MBA list, pretty much the same. Sakky has published the HBS and Wharton lists, same trends. I would ask someone to prove ONE counter-example.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I'd love too see any data you've compiled, especially for schools outside the northeast. I do think the WSJ list had a strong northeast bias. But please note, this is not a brief against Brown; I'm actually a big fan.</p>

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<p>WSJ ranking is not a great study. Top students in general trying to get into law school aim for top 14 while business top 10. However, with your average medical school these days having an acceptance rate of 5 percent, even top students are relieved to get into a just a merely decent school. </p>

<p>Example of why this is bad? WSJ says Notre Dame lags behind in medical school admissions when it comes to their 5 schools. ND has a 84% success rate for premeds, which is ridiculously high and contrary to what you would think by that study.</p>