Just finished a multi-day, multi-college tour with my son. The only school (out of the 7 we saw) was Brown. He liked the size (6,000) and the location (in a metropolitan area). He really liked Brown’s open curriculum. Are there other schools, similar in caliber to Brown, that match these criteria?
Grinnell has very open curriculum and is academically strong. But NOT urban or big. I’ll be curious to see what other schools have the model because it appeals to my son.
Vassar has a similar open curriculum. The culture of the school is similar as well.
Amherst has an open curriculum, no gen eds I believe Very near UMass Amherst, Hampshire and not far from Smith and mt. Holyoke so the benefits of a larger school through the consortium.
I thought about Vassar, but I think it is too small and not enough math/science oriented. My son will be taking post-calculus math his senior year. He is thinking about math and engineering and several other subject areas, but he is not sure what we wants to pursue. Personally, I am dislike that most colleges/universities require applications/admission into their engineering schools as a freshman.
U Rochester.
The schools with completely open curricula are: Brown, Amherst, Hamilton, Grinnell and Smith.
Many other schools have very light requirements, including Vassar, U Rochester, Wesleyan (although you need to meet some requirements at Wes if you want to graduate with honors). Then there are a ton of schools with pretty easy to fulfill distribution requirements.
But for completely open curricula, with no distribution requirement/ foreign language requirement/ etc., it’s the five I named in the first line.
When my D was at Wes, a sizable number of people were there as second choice after Brown. Or as a choice between the two. They have a lot of overlap. The curriculum is pretty open ( as said above, light requirements only for honors. My D didn’t choose to pursue that, but was PBK anyway, which was good enough for her 
)
Oberlin has many similarities to Brown culturally(albeit more radical) and academically(moreso when I attended before 2004 when they also had a policy of not entering failing grades lower than C/C- on the transcript).
They also have strengths in the natural sciences though geared more for aspiring PhDs than future pre-meds(more self-selection than anything else).
No school (that I know of…) empowers students academically quite to the degree Brown does.
On top of the open curriculum, students can take any class Pass/Fail instead of the traditional A/B/C/D/F grading system.
The pros and cons are fairly obvious, and one is both a pro and a con:
Pro:
- Academic liberty
- Less rigor/work: if taking a class P/F, you don’t have to challenge yourself to get an A; you can work just hard enough to pass. And given the open curriculum, you can avoid any challenging classes.
- This results in the ability to study what you want to, to the degree/level of difficulty that you want to. This results in the ability to spend plenty of time in the quad, lying on your back in the grass, imagining animal shapes in the clouds up above.
Con:
- Academic aimlessness and lack of academic breadth are possible without guidance.
- Less rigor/work: if you are taking all fluff classes or taking them P/F, are you learning and, if so, is it meaningful?
- This results in the ability to design a “fluff” curriculum and/or one lacking broad/rounded learning; and regardless of curriculum, to be lazy and aim only for passing marks instead of really doing your best and learning the most you can.
Evergreen State has the most open curriculum, but its offerings are probably not suitable for a highly advanced math or any engineering student. Some of the schools mentioned above like Grinnell do effectively have breadth requirements.
Note that ABET accredited engineering programs must have general education requirements. Brown requires some humanities and social studies courses for engineering majors, though fewer than other schools like MIT or Harvey Mudd.
This is tempered by major requirements from one’s department(s).
Also, while one can theoretically take all classes Pass/No Entry at Brown, almost no one does it based on my Brown alum friends’ accounts and my own observation from my experiences at Oberlin when they had the same grading policies until 2004(only difference is Brown doesn’t have plus/minus grades) because it will raise huge red flags with grad school admission committees and employers who require college transcripts as part of the hiring process for post-college jobs.
Also, while the academics at Oberlin IME was on the very manageable side, there were still plenty of classmates…including older classmates with far better HS GPA/class standing stats from elite/respectable boarding/day schools who struggled academically to the point of being placed on academic suspension or even expelled despite all that. And most were social science/humanities majors.
One other thing ignored in the above point is that one great thing about having Credit/No Entry policies is it actually ENCOURAGES STUDENTS TO TAKE MORE ACADEMIC RISKS by taking courses which are well outside their comfort zone without being heavily penalized doing so by a failing grade on their transcript for their troubles.
In my case, having that as an option gave me psychological peace of mind to take an English lit course with heavy poetry content that I would have otherwise passed on even though I ended up taking it for a grade and surprisingly did well at the end.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the same’s the case at Brown.
In our experience Brown had plenty of rigor. While the curriculum is “open”, there is intense advising that guides choices. I think it’s great that a school relies on internal interests and motivation rather than the rat maze motivation of education in general. The reading for many classes is most certainly on a par with the most difficult schools. Brown’s freedom really gives it a bum rap in my opinion. It’s my favorite school if you can’t tell And no I didn’t go there.
Thanks all. With this being my third time through the process and finally having a child academically qualified to attend a top-tiered university, I am just making suggestions of schools. Our trip this week was designed to narrow his search. We looked at schools in a city (Brown, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, MIT) and rural (Dartmouth, Cornell, Williams); varying sizes–large, medium, and small; and 6 universities (including Dartmouth) and one LAC. After all this, my son focused on Brown for a number of reasons, including its open curriculum. Fortunately, he is well situated (SAT/SAT Subject Tests, GPA, and academic rigor) for Brown. Hopefully, Brown will have the same perspective. But, he will need other options.
To put some perspective on curriculum requirements, engineering majors require 5/8 or more of course work in technical requirements and technical electives. Humanities and social studies requirements typically range from 1/8 to 1/4 of course work. Free electives range from 0 to 1/8 typically.
Liberal arts majors like math typically specify 1/3 to 1/2 of course work for the major. General education requirements vary, though they usually leave substantial free electives, often enough for a second major if the student wants to do that, or go substantially deeper or broader in the first major.
What is his reason for preferring an open curriculum?
Amherst is totally open except the first semester seminar all students take. After that it’s whatever the chosen major (s) require. Lots of overlap between Brown and Amherst for that reason.
However there is no engineering at most of these schools listed so far except UR and Smith and for obvious reasons he can’t go to Smith
Not for the open curriculum but for strengths in STEM, possibly engineering, size, and urban setting: maybe look at Case Western and Wash U? My D liked all three of them. However, I wouldn’t consider either a safety, even if they are somewhat less competitive than Brown. I know very strong students who were turned away at both this year. Demonstrated interest is important.
Why do people keep naming Rochester as an open curriculum school? It requires at least three courses in each of humanities, social studies, and science.
Though that’s only six flexibly arranged out-of-major courses, I can see that your point (a very fair one) would be that this would be similar to that of many schools with typical distribution requirements @ucbalumnus.
Believe it or not, for most Brunonians, the result of S/NC (Brown’s version of Pass/Fail, which requires at least a C) and the open curriculum is taking MORE challenging classes.
At too many colleges, the combination of distribution requirements plus the fact that a sizable percentage of the student body is aiming for med or law school results in the creation of dumbed down courses, especially in STEM, and sometimes in other fields. There are courses affectionately known as Rocks for Jocks, Clapping for Credit, Physics for Poets, etc. These are GUTS.
Pre-meds at such schools may take an introductory US history course to meet a distribution requirement. That class may cover much the same material as the AP US history class they took in high school. (I’ve known cases when they’ve actually used the same textbook. ) Other schools classify non-lab psych courses as "humanities’ courses and most pre-meds take them.
I blew up at my kid–who graduated some time ago from a different college–when I saw the final exam in the science course my kid had taken for a distribution credit. Seriously, it was easier than the final kid took in 7th grade for the same subject. Further discussion revealed my kid skipped both lectures of the course each week, but went to the section meeting religiously; kid had bought only one of the two assigned textbooks and had never attempted to read the second. Kid still got the third highest grade on the final (out of over 100 students) and an A in the course. The prof posted his lecture notes online and then pretty much read from them in class. My kid read the notes for each class and thus didn’t miss much by skipping class.That apparently was more effort than most kids taking the class put into it. My kid justified taking this ridiculous course by saying it was important to keep a high GPA for law school applications . Kid wouldn’t take a regular science course, i.e., a course a science major would take take because ONLY STEM majors took them.
At Brown, the most common pattern seems to be to take one course each semester S/NC. So, humanities students may take the same intro bio course as all the pre-meds, but take it S/NC . A pre-med may take Russian history, knowing full well that (s)he won’t be able to do all of the reading and doesn’t have as much background in history as the history majors in the class, so (s)he will take it S/NC. I think that’s better than taking a class in which you already know 90% of the material, e.g., US history.
Instead of taking the easiest courses they can find during the playing season, student athletes at Brown often take more courses S/NC during the season. Thus, a football player may choose to take 2 courses S/NC first semester and all of his classes for grades second semester. But the courses he takes are the same as other students, which is not the case at some colleges.
I think it’s ridiculous that people actually believe that schools with distribution requirements which can be met with guts are more “rigorous” because everyone has to take a few math and science courses–which in most cases are easier than these kids took in high school.
Forgive my rant but the idea that having to take courses for a grade to meet distribution requirements means that students challenge themselves more is, IMO, just not true. I think students are MUCH more likely to take hard courses outside their comfort zones if they can take them S/NC and not risk wrecking their chances to get a GPA high enough to get into a top law, med, or other professional grad school program. I think students who are aiming to go on to grad school in a particular subject will focus on their courses in that subject, no matter what. At most schools, they will pick the easiest courses possible in other areas. In Brown, they usually don’t; they take courses that sound interesting and take them S/NC.
Brown has studied the actual courses its students take and almost all of them have taken enough courses to satisfy the distribution requirements of most other schools. The difference is they’ve taken more difficult courses S/NC. Reality is that there are fewer true guts at Brown than at most other top colleges.
And, if you are the student who is actually interested in geology or astronomy etc.–the type of courses students typically use to meet distribution requirements, it’s great not to have to be in a class where the majority of your fellow students have no interest in the subject.
Rant over.