<p>I know Brown is a very good school… as known for having the happiest students, open curriculum etc… but why does it rank 15th only?</p>
<p>Isn't that enough?! Don't care that much about rankings...</p>
<p>cause usnews takes grad schools into account, and brown has a limited grad school compared to many of the other top schools (great med school, but no law school, business school etc.) -- if u look at rankings of JUST undergrad education though, brown is arguably top 5 or maybe even top 3</p>
<p>There is also a certain disdain for the open curriculum in general. Back 20 years ago, Vartan Gregorian found most of his presidency was spent constantly defending the open curriculum which other people couldn't fathom as creating a rigorous academic atmosphere.</p>
<p>Remember, the USNews is a number game that had to be designed such that the schools that are, "supposed" to be on top come out on top (some people view them as legit), and however they end up having to calculate things like that allows for anomaly and manipulation (look at Wash U's meteoric rise without much change in the actual school).</p>
<p>The way they consider grad school is by looking at alumni giving rate. Because we dont' have many professional schools (easily the largest giving rate of any type of school), our giving rates are lower because, A) More people give to their grad school than undergrad; B) More people give more to professional schools than to more academic type grad schools.</p>
<p>Also, the endowment is not great. But it is getting better.</p>
<p>Let's get something straight here, Brown's endowment is 2.3 Billion dollars. That is great. That's more than either Oxford or Cambridge. When U. S. News attempted to rank national universities by the quality of their undergraduate instruction one issue in the 90s, the top two institutions were Dartmouth and Brown, in that order. No Harvard, no Yale, no Princeton. The editors were so upset by this, they discontinued this piece in their future rankings issues. Since people like to use Harvard's 30 Billion dollar endowment to belittle Brown, let's look at some facts. Harvard has to support over 20,000 students in one of the most expensive urban venues in the nation. Brown supports roughly 7000 students in a moderately priced urban area. Harvard has a 200 year old medical school, a law school, a large business school, a theology school, a public administration graduate school, an education school, and myriad other graduate departments. Brown has a 35 year old limited enrollment medical school, no business school, no law school, no theology school, and limited other graduate departments. Harvard was founded more than 100 years before Brown, allowing it to begin to garner institutional resources in a larger urban venue much earlier than Brown. The Puritans supported Harvard from the beginning, Rhode Island has always largely been an anti-intellectual state, and that's the venue Brown finds itself in. Harvard needs its massive endowment to be an excellent school. Brown doesn't need as massive endowment to be an equally excellent school. That's it in a nutshell.</p>
<p>Well put. Actually I always liked the fact that RI was founded by athiests, Catholics, Quakers-- misfits who fled puritan MA.</p>
<p>Personally, after a certain point, rankings become useless because the schools ranker higher than that level will be respected no matter what. After that level, it becomes a matter of preference. For example, I'm considering Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and Dartmouth College for my number one choice; I will make the final decision during the summer, and then I will apply for early decision. No one can say that these schools are not respectable, and does it really matter that for whatever reason, Cornell is 12th and Brown is 15th or Cornell is 12th and Dartmouth is 8th. In the end, my decision will simply based on my feelings, what I like better, nothing material, nothing figures can tell me.</p>
<p>To be honest, I actually kinda dig that Brown doesn't have the same brand-name recognition or college ranking or something as Harvard. I liked Brown because of its open curriculum and the level of academic finesse required for most to be admitted, but I don't really like that it's an Ivy.</p>
<p>
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When U. S. News attempted to rank national universities by the quality of their undergraduate instruction one issue in the 90s, the top two institutions were Dartmouth and Brown, in that order. No Harvard, no Yale, no Princeton.
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Bingo. Right now though, Princeton is also in the mix for top undergrad experience.</p>
<p>
[quote]
cause usnews takes grad schools into account, and brown has a limited grad school compared to many of the other top schools (great med school, but no law school, business school etc.) -- if u look at rankings of JUST undergrad education though, brown is arguably top 5 or maybe even top 3
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</p>
<p>Ummm, than why is Princeton number 1, with no professional schools and about the same amount of grad students as Brown?</p>
<p>re: also, look at endowment as cited by usnews and expected income (both of which considerably less than other schools, but enough to be a top school)</p>
<p>Sheer prestige counts for a lot. And I'm afraid the aura of HYP - well deserved, in any case - is a massive attraction, especially for students in Asia, many of whom regard HYP as the gold standard. My more well-informed friends (I'm from Singapore) are duly impressed with Brown but the others are flummoxed when I mention the name. "Why not Harvard?" they ask incredulously.</p>
<p>Why not the University of Shanghai?,</p>
<p>Duly impressed? That is a troublesome statement</p>
<p>Duly impressed = 'Wow! You're going to Brown' </p>
<p>vs.</p>
<p>'Huh? What's Brown?'</p>
<p>Unfortunately, internationals do tend to worry more about name power and tend to know far less about it. Such is life...</p>
<p>MattyB...what crack are you smoking? USnews has a separate ranking for graduate schools...therefore they don't factor it into their COLLEGE rankings, "college" means undergraduate. Yes, Brown is 15th undergraduate, accept it.
However, rankings shouldn't mean that much when making a decision...I mean sure, we are all prestige whores to some extent, but is 'shouldn't' matter that much.</p>
<p>Landofoo, what crack are you smoking? Many things that are taken into account for what makes the undergraduate college good (contributing alum, endowment, full-time faculty, faculty resources, "peer assessment", and even selectivity (since students are often not well enough informed to discard biases they have based on reputations which can be largely built by graduate schools and not actual quality undergraduate experience) are all ways that having various sized and quality graduate schools can have a tremendous effect. In some of htese categories (full time profs, selectivity) Brown does quite well, in others, not as well, as a direct result of our grad school.</p>
<p>It's impossible to remove the effect of the graduate school on the university as a whole, and therefore, the college, especially using a metric that is largely quantitative without any qualitative analysis incorporated.</p>
<p>I think that's perhaps hte most important thing to realize when looking at rankings-- are you willing to accept that a quantitative analysis (peer assessment is hardly a qualitative process from my understand as to how it's done) reveals all that needs to be known to determine the better undergraduate college or do you feel that qualitative considerations can play a role?</p>
<p>Obviously...it has to be a comprehensive evaluation that takes both quantitative and qualitative factors into consideration. Unfortuantely the "qualitative" factors that go into consideration in the USnews rankings is their own personal biases towards certain schools. Why do you think the list only changes slightly every few years? Statistically, that is improbable to have such little ocsiliation.</p>