Why is Brown not as highly ranked on US News?

nbachris2788
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:10:15 +0000

I don’t think high school students are paying too much attention to the rankings, because despite its relatively low ranking, Brown was able to be more selective than any other college other than HYPS and Columbia.

Brown’s selectivity was always oddly disproportional to its US News ranking. I don’t know why that is. It’s not as if Brown enjoys some kind of huge cultural cache and is coasting on an undeserved reputation.

Honestly, I think all the undergrad institutions from about 1-20 are about the same. Undergrad is more about learning how to be a student, as opposed to learning any actual meaningful material. No undergrad is going to barred from his dreams just because there just weren’t enough Nobel Prize winners on the faculty. Nobel Prize winners probably don’t teach classes anyway, and if they do, those classes are probably very high level ones that most students won’t be able to take. Or if those professors do teach big classes, then they’re going to be way too busy to become BFFs with some overly ambitious undergrad.

The students at the #20 schools aren’t that dumb, and the students at the top schools aren’t that smart. There are plenty of intelligent and talented people to go around populating each graduating class.

I think that things like geographical location, weather, and school culture (Greek? Athletic? Hippie? Trust-fundy?) are more pertinent than things like endowment, prestigious faculty, or peer assessment.