<p>Thanks for all those who replied in earnest. No I am not a ■■■■■…i am a parent, and really do have a hippy background although I missed the 60s as I was born in 60 i caught the tail wind of it. My fear of Brown is just I guess the fear every parent has about their kids spending 200k and winding up with a great knowledge of many things, but not a master of one enough to be an expert and land a job-it is a tough economy for the pure luxury of knowledge for knowledge sakes. I agree, to the CS major-clearly there are always jobs in that career but having spent 24 years in it I can tell you it is of diminishing rewards and other than start ups and getting bought and making a killing going to work for the likes of the fortune 500s is a nice stable income but no life that I would want for my kid or myself if I did it over again. So its hard to argue for income without passion. I guess that is the tradeoff, finding a passion and just following it to its natural conclusion-after all doing something you hate no matter the pay is frankly, a waste. I can say I have had a good life with a nice income from my field but if I could do it over again, I would have gone to a school like Brown, knuckled down in HS enough to have gotten in and then maybe I would have still gone into computing-it was my natural aptitude…but knowing how outsourcing has ruined the field, its hard for me to say I would do it over.</p>
<p>Thanks for the insights and good luck to all today. I think that Brown is not that different than other colleges except that the administration respects the students in the most liberal tradition and that is a tremendous statement about the school-i like it a whole lot. I might not like every notion of “open” but people there are smart enough to realize they have to eventually start to put some logical sequences together or be on the road to their PHD…which from working with, probably PHDs were the worst programmers-lol…too academic, not good at learning on the job…its a trade off but learning who and what you are in the world, and how the world runs is the most important part of college IMHO…
thanks again…
WLM—fingers crossed for a nice pile of choices but she has a few already and I would be happy with one or two more just to really weigh the choices…will know in short order…</p>