<p>But having a huge endowment is not worth the price of sucking the soul out of everything that is Brown. </p>
<p>For the sake of PLME, it would be nice to boost the med school’s rankings, but for exactly that reason I don’t think it ever will get that high. Almost none of the elite medical schools offer 8 year programs because from a pure odds standpoint, applicants picked as high school seniors are more likely to be duds than the ones picked as college seniors (or later) especially since it is so easy to stay in the PLME program (as it should be if the point it to encourage academic freedom).</p>
<p>I don’t want Brown to try to be a wall street factory. Even though it currently doesn’t, my friends from Brown who went that road sure don’t seem to think they got short changed.</p>
<p>If I wanted to go to Harvard for undergrad and play 2nd fiddle to the grad schools I would have. If I wanted to go to MIT and have everyone assume I’m an engineer regardless of my actual interests I would have. Princeton is the only school on your magical list that is anything close to Brown in terms of its undergraduate focus (Yale’s college system helps, and Duke/Stanford have athletics to rally and fundraise around but they’re still quite different from Brown and I assure you that difference does not equal better), why would we want to lose what makes Brown Brown just to pander to the small few who decide their undergraduate experience so heavily on a magazine?</p>
<p>If you go on an endowment per student measurement, don’t we actually have a much larger endowment than it looks?</p>
<p>Brown has a unique educational philosophy, and with so much of the USNWR rankings being based on what other deans think, it’s never going to get to the top because doing so would require every dean acknowledging that they way their school runs is wrong. For the most extreme example: How can Columbia’s ever say that Brown is a better school? The philosophies are basically polar opposites and of course Brown’s peer schools will always look down on it for allowing students to make their own curriculums, not grade with +/-, and not have failing courses on the transcript.</p>