At the school where I work, everyone, from admissions leaders to seasoned staff to seasonal readers, undergoes training. Every year. Everyone is able to evaluate students in context, regardless the region/area/school district profile. I am confident we aren’t an outlier with respect to this, as there is considerable sharing of processes across colleges. Not to mention the high admissions leader/staff turnover rate brings in knowledge of processes from other institutions.
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And that’s why the majority of matriculated students at Brown are scholarship students.
I am on record as to believing schools should be able to accept the applicants they want to accept, but I am also on record that we should look at what the schools are actually doing to see who is actually getting in/policies/etc.
Brown, like many other highly rejective schools, is accepting a disproportionate number of very wealthy, very privileged students. I personally think that is their right and privilege…but I am not willing to say that they are somehow really looking for lots of diamonds in the rough or truly seeking to find lots of students from the bottom 80%.
The are very good at recreating the system they currently have in place - where 52% of students are full pay and many of their “scholarship” students are from families making low 6 figure incomes (100,000-300,000/yr).
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This is one reason why I find posts about “starting salary reports” in comparing different universities and degrees to be so misleading.
I’ll use the most obvious example- law schools which have a large number of graduates starting federal clerkships or joining the DOJ. Public sector salaries pale in comparison to those of large firms. But those same large firms pay large signing bonuses several years down the road– ginormous bonuses to former SCOTUS clerks, large bonuses for appellate experience, equally large bonuses to lawyers coming out of federal prosecutors offices, etc.
So looking at “how much money will I make three years from now” for a law school applicant is a very shortsighted way to understand compensation in the legal profession.
It would be nice to see a report showing where these young adcom’s end up. I would guess that very few of them become “career adcom’s” or stay in higher ed for very long. These roles are a nice landing pad but often turn into short term stints while the Classics and Philosophy majors decide whether to get an MBA, JD, etc. And yes, it will mean that the demographics of these low paying jobs will reflect students who don’t have loans, and can either live at home, are being subsidized by mom and dad, or just keep their college apartment and eat Ramen three nights a week.
But since there are still people in the world that don’t want to become engineers or doctors- here’s a career option that does not involve asking “would you like fries with that”.
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I work at a Brown peer, and I would be shocked if entry level AOs are making 30-35K. I’m guessing it’s more like $50-55K, based on the entry level salaries in my office (not admissions but similar in terms of job profiles and candidates—which is to say, lots of humanities/social sciences new grads). Again, not a large salary and certainly not one that competes with jobs in investment banking or consulting, but one that is generally liveable in a city like Providence. And university benefits are still generally quite good, and quality of life is pretty high, as staff aren’t expected to work 60-hour weeks.
I have quite a few first-gen team members, and my sense has been that for folks who want to be in the non-profit space, university packages are pretty competitive.
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Some of them transition to the “dark side” and become college counselors and make much more money.
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@Bruno99 You make good points.
My points really only were that in a period in which these colleges are all talking about a commitment to diversity, this doesn’t look like diversity, and that they were already there making decisions a coupe of months on the job. That mix of “Poster kid for privilege” and “is making admissions decisions after three months on the job” really doesn’t sit well with me.
To be fair, Brown does a pretty job with the selection of their “Student Ambassadors”. These look like representations of a diverse society.
Not actually correct. According to Brown’s CDS from 2024-2025, 48% of incoming students and 46.9% of all students received some need-based aid. So, at least in the 2024-2025 school year, the “scholarship kids” were a minority. I ignored the 0.6% of students who were part time.
Overall, Brown is one of the Ivies with the lowest percent of students on financial aid, at least in the 2024-2025 CDS.
According to the 2024-2025 CDS, the percent on aid was:
Princeton: 66.9% 
Harvard: 54.3%
Dartmouth: 53.8%
Columbia: 49.4%
Yale: 48.8%
Cornell: 47.9%
Brown: 46.9%
Upenn: 46.3%
So the only one for which we can truly say that kids on financial aid are a majority is Princeton.
Of course, referring to a kid from a family of four who are making $250,000 a year, with a home a retirement savings, as a “Scholarship Kid” because they are receiving $5,000 in financial aid, is a bit hyperbolic.
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The proportion of the class that received financial aid in the CDS numbers you posted would include students who didn’t qualify for need based aid but took some/all of the $5.5K federal student loans (if you included the number who received any self help aid.)
Diversity for colleges is marketing to potential applicants from as large a range of the population as possible, and marketing that kind of public image generally. It looks like many highly selective colleges are successful at that marketing in terms of people believing that they have SES diversity, even though their actual SES distribution is highly upward skewed.
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I’m sorry my irony didn’t come across in my post - I thought pointing out that 52% of Brown students were full pay later in my post made it clear.
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I note it isn’t just Ivies, almost every more selective college has a skew toward upper middle and upper class students as compared to college bound students generally. There are differences in detail but that general observation is almost always true.
There has been a lot of discussion about why this happens, but I think high level it comes down to funding. Some people want to give money to help make selective colleges more affordable or otherwise diverse, but a lot of people–including those in charge of public funding–simply have other priorities.
All the Ivies guarantee full need met without loans. In these colleges, the number with full need met, and that excludes PLUS loans, unsubsidized loans, and private alternative loans always equals the number of students determined to have need.
However, for a few of the colleges, the number in the “Number of students in line d who were awarded any need-based scholarship or grant aid” is smaller than the number of students who were considered as having full need met without loans.
So maybe a small number of students with need only qualified for"self-help aid".
In any case, you’re correct, the number who received aid does not only include the number who received scholarship or grant aid. So not all students who received any aid would be considered as @beebee3 ironically (now I know) “scholarship kids”.
BTW, I just took that theoretical family that I threw out, and fed it into Brown’s MyIntuition app, and the best estimate actually provided $28K a year in scholarship and $3,000 employment. So a bit more than $5,000.
A family making $300K a year, with $100K in the bank, and $500K in investments, could still get $2,600 in need-based scholarships.
I will admit that the irony indeed went SWOOSH over my head.
Of course, but anyone can take out the student loans whether or not it’s a formal part of the FA package. Plenty of parents have their students take out the loans. Typically talking about parents who will say they want their kid to ‘have skin in the game’ or whatever other cute names people come up with to describe that. Some students would also prefer to take out the loan rather than work during the summer and/or school year to make spending money.
PS. I will once again say kudos to you for your volunteer work with kids who are underserved. For that you deserve an actual Kudo:
This is a kudu.
Maybe you can give them one of these.
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Curious as to whether or not Brown uses these recent graduates in admissions presentations to large groups of parents & prospective students.
Many years ago, we attended an on-campus group presentation at another Ivy League school. The lead presenter was a fairly recent grad, but completely out-of-touch with real world concerns. The poised, attractive, seemingly wealthy presenter repeatedly referred to the school as a “country-club” and as a “cocktail party”. It was quickly dropped from the list.
The two most common destinations for students from our kid’s prep school were, and are, Brown & Georgetown. Those students matriculating at either university who were well known among our family were wealthy.
FWIW The Ivy League school with the most SES reach year after year from our kid’s prep school was Princeton (which accepted a few students from the bottom half of the class academically even though not athletes).
As about 30% of each class matriculated/matriculates at an Ivy League school, the SES chart posted above by @MWolf seems accurate based on our limited knowledge.
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So following up on this—my kid did get admitted RD and attended and graduated. I was an active participant on the parent Facebook page and there were always a lot of posts about financial aid issues from families who definitely were getting significant aid.
My understanding is that when friend groups went out and especially when they want to rent an off campus apartment together, issues of finances do come up.
My guess is even the wealthier kids likely have friends and peers with a different economic reality and that, plus mandatory training, hopefully somewhat mitigates the concerns listed above.
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What is the (parental) SES distribution of that prep school?
I don’t know, but there were, and may still be, many from families with generational wealth. The website indicates that almost 40% receive need based financial aid (total COA is about $80,000 per academic year including room & board). As the percentage of need based financial aid recipients increased from below 30% to just below 40%, the prominence of Brown, Georgetown, & U Penn decreased with respect to college matriculations from this prominent boarding school.
As a side note: I just looked at the most recent class (Class of 2025) matriculation list. Ivy League matriculations were just 23% with the top 5 colleges (slightly over 10% matriculated at Harvard & Yale combined):
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Harvard
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Yale
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Cornell
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Columbia, Georgetown, & Colby
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Only 2 students matriculated at Brown University from the Class of 2025. (Same number for Princeton.)(3 at Dartmouth.)
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The biggest change that I noticed was that no students matriculated at U Penn–which probably accounts for the lower percentage of Ivy League matriculants.
Brown, like many schools, had to make a choice. If they’re going to give full rides to lower-income students, they also have to enroll a significant number of full-pay kids. That’s just how the math works. We can complain about the donut hole it creates, but it’s a reality of the system.
But fine, let’s assume Brown could fund a lot more full rides. Then what? They still only have so many seats. Are we arguing that higher-income kids should be pushed out simply because of income? Many full-pay students are top-tier applicants. Despite popular belief, economic privilege and academic merit aren’t mutually exclusive.
Even doubling the number of full-ride spots doesn’t magically fix the preparation gap that our poor K-12 system creates. Admissions is not where the root issue gets fixed.
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This very roughly correlates with endowment size, with Dartmouth (9B) notably punching above its weight and Penn (25B) punching well below. Yale (44B) is also pretty disappointing. Princeton doesn’t surprise me given endowment per student (36B for <10K students).
Brown has the smallest endowment at a little above 7B.
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Interesting article, but like @momofboiler1 I would love to have read the perspective of a more seasoned AO. I’m awlays fascinated with admissions officers’ insights.
Three of my students (Jane, Jill, and John, pseudonyms) have been accepted to Brown in recent years. Jane, the recruited athlete “doesn’t count” as much as the other two, in the context of the article. Another of my students (Jack) ED’ed this cycle and was rejected, not even deferred.
If there was a common trait with all these kids, I’d say it’s that they their love of learning was obvious and that maybe they were all a bit on the quirky side.
I wasn’t suprised when Jill and John were accepted. I was genuinely surprised when Jack was outright rejected. I thought he was a good fit, with insightful and fun–to-read essays, along with everything else. I really wish I knew why he didn’t get in. It could have been his intended major or something else, but only Brown knows. It wasn’t money though, as his family is well off.
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