To much fanfare, the University recently announced the creation of a new School of Public Health. Slated to open in July, the school will help improve Brown’s health courses and combine them into a single program. Public Health will become the third professional school at Brown, in addition to the Alpert Medical School (1972) and the School of Engineering (2010). The Graduate School also offers a number of Master’s and Doctoral programs.
While the move is certainly exciting, now is the right time to take a step back and examine Brown’s history in the context of graduate programs. Brown is largely an undergraduate enterprise, and so we must ask: Is another graduate school the right fit for Brown?
One of New England’s quintessential “university-colleges,” Brown has a reputation of offering its undergraduates a focused, high-quality education with the breadth and resources of a large school. It has high-demand and a single-digit acceptance rate—testimony to its intellectual student body and its high standing. Its Open Curriculum is unique in the industry. Clearly, there has been success at the undergraduate level. Yet, graduate offerings are a different story. Brown has largely shirked when it comes to adding them, and while the current programs are all as good as the Brown name would suggest, they are certainly limited in number.
Like most schools, Brown opened first as a purely undergraduate institution under the mouthful of a name “Trustees and Fellows of the College or University in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America.” As time passed, though, the renamed “Brown” stayed as just that, while other top institutions have strayed from this path. Part of the reason for this is that University officials have long read the school’s Charter as discouraging graduate programs, and have stayed true to the perceived mission of Brown: to provide a robust education to undergraduates students. Due to this restrictive language, Brown today is one of just two Ivy institutions without a business or law school. The other is Princeton; Dartmouth has only a business school.
Ironically, Brown was actually an early leader in graduate education. Graduate study began in 1850 and after some starts and stops, the first Master’s and Doctorate’s degrees were being issued regularly by the late 1880s. Brown was one of the earliest Doctoral-granting institutions, part of a prominent group that included other Ivy’s, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. At the turn of the century, Brown was a preeminent leader in graduate education.
That early superintendence did not last, however. While Brown helped spearhead American graduate – and especially doctoral – education in the late 19th century, it never fully embraced post-college studies like the other institutions. Undergraduate enrollment on College Hill continued to grow well into the 1900s; the graduate population held steady. Today, Brown’s graduate cohort is still much smaller than those of its peer schools.
As the creation of the School of Public Health demonstrates, administrators have recently tried to change this. A significant number of new Master’s programs have been created in the past two decades and the Doctoral ones have grown, as well. Additionally, the University recently partnered with Instituto de Empresa (“IE”), a top-ranked Spanish business school, to create a 15-month, Executive MBA program.
With IE and the School of Public Health, Brown’s graduate program has expanded quickly, but is not yet as large as others in the Ivy League. Still, some have questioned whether this is an auspicious development for the University, or the wrong direction for an undergraduate-focused enterprise.
This argument could break both ways. It is true the college rating indexes often prize graduate education. By growing high-quality post-college offerings, perhaps Brown could advance in the seemingly all-important rankings. Additionally, graduate-level (or at least Master’s) programs are often money-makers for schools. This additional revenue could be used to enhance school-wide services (whether that be facilities, public safety, et cetera) or to support the undergraduate program. Graduate students also contribute to the diversity of the school, acting as mentors and teachers. From this, there is reason to believe that more graduate programs could enhance the University as a whole.
There are also those, though, who hold that graduate offerings detract from Brown’s core responsibility: educating college students. By expanding beyond that basic service, we could become an institution that focuses on its Doctoral candidates at the expense of its teenage enrollees. Imagine some of Brown’s largest courses being taught by teaching assistants. Introduction to Economics would be ever more confusing and City Politics – well, it just would not be the same.
Truthfully, the ideal probably lies between these two extremes. There is benefit to be had by expanding graduate education. The Public Health School will combine a disparate set of currently operating programs into a coherent center. The Executive MBA relies on IE, the Madrid-based business school, to provide much of the material Brown does not teach. Neither program is huge burden, or a major change in current operations. Nevertheless, Brown’s undergraduate education must remain at the hub. No matter the extent that we explore graduate offerings, Brown cannot lose its “university-college” moniker.
Similarly, Brown should not look to merely emulate the Harvards and Yales of the industry. That market is cornered – and not one, I think, Brown wants to join. Rather than improving our ranking or recognition through a myopic race to be like “#1” and “#2,” we should value – and promote – the uniqueness that epitomizes Brown. Our Open Curriculum, the way students’ construct their own educational futures, and the resultant passion for learning are each great selling points. In other words, expanding beyond the College is not an inherently poor decision, but it must be made through the lens of Brown’s core undergraduate focus.
The just released interim report from the Committee on Doctoral Education is encouraging in this respect. Part of President Paxson’s strategic planning initiative, the Committee is taking a holistic look at all of Brown’s graduate programs. The Report recognizes the value of the College’s “open educational model” and “student-centered approach” to learning, and recommends that graduate studies be developed within that context. This is a positive sign for the development of graduate studies that will supplement, rather than supplant the University’s current offerings.
As the website of the Graduate School highlights: “World Class? Yes. Cutthroat? No.” The graduate schools associated with Brown are excellent, yet the website is right. A critical component of a Brown education is this relaxed nature. There is a reason we are one of the happiest schools in the country. This model reflects a key component of Brown – it lacks the same cutthroat nature of the over Ivy’s. This is, in part, a result of the Open Curriculum, which equalizes students’ grades in a way that makes it slightly less competitive, and disincentives competing for every last point. Yet Brown is still a truly excellent school, proving that it is possible to provide a world class, yet not cutthroat, education.
Regardless of the path we embark on, we should not forget the successful one we have already traveled. Brown has much to be proud of. Its educational philosophy is unique in the Ivy League and it is an institution respected across the nation and world. As Brown tangoes with enhanced graduate programs, though, it must remember its foundation. If expansion is done in concurrence with Brown’s philosophical values, it could be a positive step for the University.