Brown is the artsy Ivy. This isn’t because it is an arts school, but rather because the culture of the university embodies the ethos of the arts. This is amplified by where Brown is located, in the creative hub of Providence, Rhode Island, and who it has as a neighbor: RISD, one of the most famous creative schools in the world. Brown takes bits and pieces from the communities around it, adding exceptional research opportunities and unique educational approaches to the mix. They have an open curriculum that encourages exploration and discovery, which is very much on theme. Brown receives well over 40,000 applications each year and aim to admit about 2,400. The acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was 5.65%. Then, it dropped. For the Class of 2030, the acceptance rate went down .3% to 5.35%.
What Are My Application Options?
When you apply to Brown, you have two primary avenues for admission. You can apply Regular Decision, which is what most first-year applicants do, or you can apply Early Decision. In this post, we’re going to break down why Early Decision is your best way into Brown and how to make the most of it.
Brown heavily prioritizes Early Decision. For the Class of 2029, over half of the total class, 907 of 1,768 students, were admitted ED. This was repeated for the Class of 2030 when again over 50% of the first-year class was accepted Early Decision. What this tells us is that applying ED to Brown is an exceptionally powerful tool. If Brown is a dream school for you, you need to apply ED if you want to get in. If you don’t use the Early Decision round and decide to see what happens in Regular Decision, is only slightly better than rolling a pair of dice and betting on double 2’s. Seriously, we checked the probability on that.
If you want to beat the odds at Brown, we can help. Learn more here.
Why Should I Apply Early Decision To Brown?
The overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2030, remember, was 5.35%. The Regular Decision acceptance rate, though, was much lower at only 3.94%. The Early Decision acceptance rate, though, was much higher at 16.5%. Now, this number doesn’t actually apply to all ED applicants. The ED round includes recruited athletes, children of large donors, and other ‘special cases’ that had a good idea that they were in before they even pressed submit. However, even when you account for all those non-standard applicants, the ED acceptance rate is more than twice the regular decision acceptance rate at Brown.
Brown has been pretty transparent about how they review first-year applications recently. Many members of the Brown Admissions team are recent graduates of Brown, so it should not come as a surprise that they are deeply passionate about finding students who will strengthen and value the Brown community. Now, Brown asserts that they give applications “as long as it takes.” But that actually isn’t feasible. They have to figure out if you are right for Brown fast. Each admissions officer has the task of reviewing over 1,000 applications each year. The amount of time they can give to each application is a matter of minutes, and those that are a ‘no’ get even less consideration.
What Can You Do?
The easy answer to what you can do is to apply early, but the harder answer is that you need to plan and prepare well in advance of applying to ensure that your application is as strong as possible. Simply applying early does not turn a weak application into a strong one. Nothing, in fact, turns a weak application to Brown into a strong application except strengthening your application. “The expectations of an applicant being a ‘good community member’ and a successful student at Brown do not change,” Brown admissions says, based on the applicant submitting Early Decision or Regular Decision.
So, you have work to do. Below, we break it down.
Grades
Admissions team members have shared that they tend to start their application review with the school report, which gives context to the next component they look at: the transcript. “The most important consideration in the admission process is your high school performance and preparedness,” they say. This includes grades, but also how you chose to challenge yourself. Brown wants to see transcripts that show excellence in performance alongside a willingness to challenge oneself. That means taking the hardest classes that you have access to not only in the subject most closely aligned with what you want to study, but across the board.
According to Brown statistics, 95% of incoming first-years for the Class of 2029 were in the top 10% of their graduating class. The other 5% were most likely (and almost certainly) recruited athletes or ‘special cases.’ If you fall into either of those groups, you probably aren’t reading this post. If you are reading this, you must be at the top of your class. It’s truly non-negotiable.
Scores
Brown requires that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, but they emphasize that the scores are informative — not determinative. There is no minimum for admission, and the scores are considered within the context of your reality. In their words: “Considering testing in context means that our understanding of a student’s scores is based on multiple factors, including educational background, socioeconomic status, home and school community, and accessibility to well-equipped testing centers…”
So, they don’t expect every applicant to have a perfect score to get in, but they do expect you to be prevailing above and beyond your resources. Again, there are no minimum standardized test scores to be considered for admission by Brown, but functionally there sort of are even when they take into account your resources and opportunities. If the last two sentences sound contradictory, we get it. They really do care about your circumstances, but they also expect a lot from applicants to be seriously considered for admission.
There are so many impressive applicants from such a wide range of backgrounds and resources that have the high SAT or ACT scores that Brown is looking for. To ensure your application stands out, aim an SAT ERW score of 740+ and a Math section score of 750+. On the ACT, you want to be able to submit a 35 or 36.
Extracurriculars
There is no particular set of clubs or activities that make your more attractive to Brown. There are, though, a few guidelines you must follow. First, you need to be pursuing things that are relevant to your prospective major — not only things relevant to your major, but at least two or three. Next, you need to be doing something that speaks to the value your hold for your community and how you work to improve the place you live in. “Admissions officers also look for students who are engaged with their communities,” they say, and that could be through a club, and independent project, a political campaign, or employment.
Finally, you need to be doing at least one thing that underlines your ability to work as a member of a team, and another (or it could be the same one) that emphasizes your ability to lead a team. Since you will be submitting your application in the fall of your senior year, you need to hold a leadership role that you were either elected to or selected for during junior year such that you have stories to tell from the experience in your essays.
Essays
When applying to Brown, they expect to see strong writing with a story to tell. By “story,” we don’t mean trauma or elaborate experiences. Rather, what works for Brown is truly authenticity, curiosity, and grit. That can be shown by writing about something fancy-sounding, or by writing about a summer job doing trail work at a state park.
The key in your writing is to link your academic passions to your personal passions and to tell that story through narrative-forward essays that do three things:
Connect with the reader on a personal level.
Communicate your enthusiasm for your interests.
Emphasize the role of community in your life and how you see yourself contributing to the community at Brown.
Apply Early
Remember that even with all the serious language around the Early Decision agreement, Early Decision is not actually legally binding. Brown can fine you for pulling out of an ED agreement, but that’s about it. The biggest negative repercussion for breaking an ED agreement is actually felt by your school, as colleges have been known to ‘punish’ a high school after a student breaks an ED agreement. So, don’t go into ED with the idea of breaking it. However, if you really need to in the end to make the best choice for yourself, it is possible.
This should give you some sense of confidence in deciding to apply to Brown ED, as you can get out of it if you really need to.
As you work on the application, start thinking about the video well in advance of actually needing to make it. The video gets looked at last, but it really should be something that you are thinking about close to first. All the same rules for the essays apply here, too.
In this post, we’ve been focusing on the overall application items you need to know to ED for Brown’s main undergraduate college, but Brown has two programs with their own unique application quirks: the Brown|RISD Dual Degree (2% acceptance rate) and PLME (1.3% acceptance rate). These programs, as evidenced by the acceptance rates, are some of the most competitive and difficult to enter programs in the country, if not globally. These applications require additional strategy steps to make a strong argument for admission.
Whatever your application, know that you do have a fighting chance because you’ll be connecting directly with other humans. “The admissions committee does not,” Brown says, “use artificial intelligence to sort through any of the applications, no matter a student’s academic standing…” So, it’s up to you to make the most of the moments you have with the Brown application readers. For your best shot, get in touch.
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