Brown v. Swarthmore

unalove
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:27:14 +0000

I think of Brown and Swarthmore as sibling schools to Chicago. All three schools are distinct from each other, but I think they share a lot of similar students. As my dad likes to say, all three are “Kool-Aid” schools: you either buy into the educational and social philosophy or you don’t.

glassesarechic: My impression is a lot of students go through a Brown/Chicago process. For the ideal Chicago student, the core stands in for classes the student would choose to take anyway, so the classes he or she “has” to take are not burdensome. (That’s how I made the choice to go to a “core” school: I knew that even with an open curriculum, I wanted to take these classes anyway, and the bonus of having a core was that everybody was taking similar classes along with me).

But that’s a total aside to the issue of Brown vs. Swarthmore. Personally, I think I’d like Swat more than I’d like Brown because I like the emphasis on academics, the campus, the people I know there, and the toned-down party scene, but I don’t think my opinion counts for all that much here.