<p>Hehe Ivy_Grad, you always give props to Brown. Why do you think Brown should be in the top ten?</p>
<p>USNews doesn't seem to like Brown, and where I live, nobody's even heard of it. People have been asking me where I got in this past week, and whenever I say "Brown" they either don't know it, or think it's funny that a college is named after a color. Even people who know the name don't seem to know that it's an Ivy. Some people think of it as a hippy school where everyone smokes pot all the time (our local state university was voted one of the best pot-smoking universities by Cannabis magazine, by the way).</p>
<p>A lot of people I've talked to regarding my college choices seem to be pointing me towards Pomona instead of Brown. So it's interesting when somebody keeps sticking up for the school. Any reasons? (I do think it's a bit underrated.)</p>
<p>According to how US News defines LACs, Williams, Amherst, Haverford, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Vassar, Wellesley, Reed, Middlebury, perhaps Smith or Claremont McKenna. I think some might include others, such as Davidson, but I'm less familiar with them.</p>
<p>as for Brown in particular, do a search and you will see numerous reasons why i feel it is probably the most underrated school in USNWR top rankings.</p>
<p>for simplicity purposes, i'd some it up with USNWR's own selectivity ranking (in which Brown is squarely in the Top 10 most selective National U's) and Atlantic Monthly which also places Brown in the Top 10 most selective colleges.</p>
<p>further, to the post above, in terms of graduate placement, Brown ranks no. 9 for National U's on the WSJ Feeder Ranking (stripping out the LACs)</p>
<p>also for sheer undergraduate focus, attention and the lion's share of faculty access, it's hard to beat Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton - the average undergrad to grad ratio is roughly 2.5x (i.e. undergrads outnumber grads) compare that to other larger research U's such as Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Caltech whose average graduates OUTNUMBER undergrads 1.5x.</p>
<p>I've always maintained that out of the top universities, it's hard to beat the undergraduate focused programs such as Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown - none of which has all of the "big three" grad schools (namely, Law, Medicine AND Business) - yet its hard to argue the world class quality of both the faculty and students at any one of those institutions.</p>
<p>Just based on undergraduate education, Yale, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania (especially Wharton), Princeton, Brown, Georgetown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Amherst, Williams, Columbia, Duke Cornell.</p>