So I’m not saying like “why did Brown accept that person with a 2200 and not someone else with a 2400!!1!1!1!1” I know brown uses holistic admissions. But they seem to regularly deny people who have the stats AND appear to be a really good fit for the school? People who apply ED, people who talk about being self starters and discuss how they would utilize the New Curriculum, people who are interested in the sort of “Arts and social justice” thing brown is known for. Brown’s admissions are SO WEIRD and as someone who might have brown as her first choice, this freaks me out. Thoughts?
Oops posted this in yale forum
Can a moderator move it
You can substitute “Brown” with any other college with an acceptance rate below 10% and the question is still valid. Just file it away under “great mysteries of life.” 
This is true, @skieurope. However, I somehow feel like it’s more true with Brown than at least Penn, Dartmouth, and Cornell, maybe even Columbia. For example Penn uses ED kind of aggressively and I feel like in their ED around if you have the stats and can really articulate why you fit Penn you will get in. Not so with brown.
I don’t think Brown wants a school full of social justice warriors or kids that are exactly like the kids that are there. I think they want kids with a lot of different backgrounds to assemble a quirky class.
Agree that you can say the same thing about other sub-10% colleges.
Brown admissions is not “quirky” and neither are its students. What you don’t know, and what guides admissions at Brown and other elite schools, are its institutional goals. These come from the top – the president and the trustees and the faculty. If the faculty says “accept kids with higher SATs,” admissions responds. When former Pres. Simmons said, “I want more first-gen students,” that happened.
It may seem quirky to you, but there really is some thought behind the decisions. Also, you aren’t reading all 31,000 applications – you are basing your opinion on a handful of students that you know.
Cornell and UPenn have much larger undergraduate classes, so they have more latitude in their decision making. Can’t speak to Dartmouth. Based on what I read here on CC, there are thousands of students who get rejected from these highly selective colleges every year in situations where it “doesn’t make sense” – Brown is not alone in this.
I was surprised that two kids in my daughter’s HS class of 150 got into Brown. One is a very talented musician, and the other is an excellent athlete.
I have no inside information, but I suspect Brown realizes it has to be a bit different to compete for students. If I were Brown, I would not want to be the school that people attend by default simply because they couldn’t get in to HYPS. So Brown has to differentiate itself by other means–and nothing is so important as your people.
Look at size of endowments pasted below. Harvard is 10x Brown! All other ivies also well ahead in $$. This means it is very difficult for Brown to compete head-to-head vs other top schools in terms of facilities, salaries, financial aid, and so on. But they can compete for what matters most–people. So it makes sense to march to different drummer, accept kids that show a certain something, and reject the kids who have high stats but not a certain something. (Sorry, I do not know what that certain something might be). In short, be an alternative to HYP, not just a lesser HYP. The open curriculum falls under this strategy. The open curriculum was very radical when first adopted, although more common now.
Anecdotally, I have noticed same thing you observed. I’ve seen a number accomplished kids reporting admission to multiple top-selective schools but not Brown, and other kids who only get into Brown. (There still is a lot of overlap, but just not as much as I’d expect…again all observations anecdotal so take with grain of salt). To me, this makes perfect sense from institutional POV–fill the campus with people who really want to be at Brown, not just kids who are interchangeable with other top schools or who couldn’t get into slightly more prestigious HYPMS. A few wild cards get played at Brown admissions game.
IVY ENDOWMENTS
Harvard University — $36.4 billion
Yale University — $23.9 billion
Princeton University — $21.0 billion
University of Pennsylvania — $9.6 billion
Columbia University — $9.2 billion
Cornell University — $6.2 billion
Dartmouth College — $4.5 billion
Brown University — $3.2 billion
The fact is that each of these highly selective schools can fill their classes many times over with qualified students. It could be a matter of luck that you happen to fill particular niche(s) that the school is looking for (e.g rural, Midwest, accomplished writer) and the pool of candidates that year is not deep (or conversely, unluckily very deep), but so much of the process is subjective because humans and not an algorithm are making the decisions. Even within the small sample size of CC, all you have to do is look at the results posts and see how many candidates get into A and B but not C and D and other posters with close to identical stat’s and types of EC’s get into C and D but not A and B, and so forth. The Common App essays and recommendations are likely to be the same for all schools each candidate applies to; there will be some variation in the school specific essays, but I assume most kids like mine recycled certain essays that had a common theme. So, what is the major variable – the primary/first readers of each application. If you read the various “insiders” guides to the admissions process written by former AO’s (a good one is the “Gatekeepers; Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College”, written by a former AO of Wesleyan), you see that an AO may develop a personal attachment to certain candidates because of some background factor and/or something in their essay that resonates with the AO such that the AO is willing to spend their limited advocate capital on that candidate. Given all the elements of chance and human subjectivity, every college applicant would be wise to spread their net across a good mix of reach, target and safety schools.
I have two anecdotes to add.
- During freshman drop-off six years ago, there was an event just for parents where the then Brown Director of Admissions, james miller, spoke. He told us something I've never forgotten: when you meet one brown student, you've met one brown student. Over the next four years, I met many of my son's friends, and the things they had in common were intelligence, curiosity, and a keen interest in whatever they were pursuing. They also seemed genuine, authentic. But man, I saw for myself what James Miller was describing. There is no sterotypical brown student.
- Agreeing with @BKSquared about the applications, especially the essay. I helped a westchester, NY senior last year with his application. He was accepted to Yale as an unhooked applicant with great grades, pretty good rigor, ECs common but decent (co-editor in chief of newspaper, track but not recruitable), but low SAT scores for Yale (720 CR, 680M, 770 w), so a 1400 for the primary scores, which put him in Yale's bottom 25%. He was rejected from Georgetown, Cornell and Columbia, but accepted also to tufts, JHU, Hamilton, and his 2 safeties. We think his essay struck a cord with his Yale admission reader. In her handwritten comments on his admission letter, she said that she loved his essay bc it reminded her of growing up in Maine. She only reads for Westchester, so perhaps she's not reading many, if any, essays about summers spent as a sailing camp instructor in Maine, which is what he wrote about. It was a charming, evocative essay, nothing earth shattering, but it had some lyrical sentences describing a moonlit evening on the water observing the lit plankton. It touched a chord with her. That, and perhaps they were looking for writers/editors for the Yale Daily News.
I think in one respect, Brown should count itself lucky that it hasn’t crammed its campus with half a century’s worth of poorly placed modern buildings. It’s no secret that of all the Ivy League colleges, Yale, Brown and Princeton are the most - for lack of a better word - Ivy-like.
agreed re: wanting kids who march to their own drum and want Brown, but that’s why it confuses me that they don’t make better use of ED. I guess it simply comes down to far more qualified applicants than spots. sighs
wonderful story about the Yale applicant with the Maine essay! gives me a little sliver of hope. now to write something lyrical and resonant… 
People really overestimate how good their essays are - I think especially when it comes to a topic like the open curriculum. It really was truly radical at the time and while still being a little bit out there, a lot of schools have shifted away from Columbia’s side of the spectrum and more towards ours.
I’m currently working with a physician who graduated from Brown in the mid 70s. He was one of the first students to do 4 years of New Curriculum. He’s like a living embodiment of Ira Magaziner’s dream. Took all his classes S/NC and got performance reports instead of grades. Likes to remind me that it’s S/NC, not P/F because there’s no such thing as “failure” when it comes to education (this is in the context of encouraging me to propose treatment plans or make educated guesses on questions he asks me rather than being afraid to be wrong). Told me about how he used to sit in on random classes at Penn when he was a med student there and that he felt like the students were so ungrateful for all the educational opportunities they had. He told me a story about how before every exam in med school he would stand up and give a speech about how the school shouldn’t have them do the exam but instead they should go through the exam together for 2-3 hours, dissecting every question and answer choice because then everyone would really know the material and isn’t that what med school was supposed to be about: learning the knowledge and skills needed to be a successful physician?
The New Curriculum is really a lot more than “no distribution requirements” or “freedom to pick my courses.” At Brown its tentacles reach into every facet of student life and I’ve met a lot of otherwise very talented high schoolers who simply don’t get it or at least they get it but can’t articulate it well enough.
That is so interesting, @iwannabe_Brown . My goal would be to write the most insightful “why brown” essay possible. I very very much appreciate the intellectual stimulation that open curriculum creates, but I could definitely imagine that nothing a high schooler would write about it would be unique. Maybe you could tell me more about what makes it special? I’m not asking you to spoon feed me essay material. I just have been doing a lot of introspection about whether such a curriculum is right for me in the first place.
Right there you’re already off the mark. The open curriculum doesn’t create anything. That’s the whole point. It’s like saying a paint brush stimulates you to make a great painting or a typewriter stimulates you to make a great poem. The curriculum is a tool - a tool for you to create your own path. In the wrong hands, the open curriculum is a disaster - so little structure and so much freedom without the right mindset won’t lead you anywhere. You have to navigate the curriculum yourself (with the help of advisers) but the whole point is what are you going to do with this opportunity? What are you hoping to accomplish and how do you see the open curriculum being a part of that goal? That’s how you write something unique. You have never applied to Brown before.
Thanks for the clarification. A better word I could have used would be that the open curriculum FOSTERS openness and intellectual curiousity. I understand that I need to get specific. Thanks, @iwannabe_Brown
Better, but still not great. What about paintbrushes and pencils foster your ability to make great works of art? Can anyone who has access to a paintbrush or a pencil paint an amazing picture of write a great poem?
Right, so you’re saying I’d use the why brown essay to say specifically what I’d use the new curriculum to do, IE. “I’d concentrate in English and international relations with an interdisciplinary focus in” blah blah blah @iwannabe_Brown