At a Glance
Brown admits 6.3% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Debt at Graduation
47.5%
receive need-based grant aid
$36,263
average debt at graduation
Brown graduates carry an average of $36,263 in debt.
Merit Aid
Not reported by this school — some schools award aid based on need alone, without merit scholarships.
Getting In
Brown admits 6.3% of applicants.
Brown University's Early Decision applicants are admitted at more than 4x the rate of Regular Decision applicants — 17.9% vs 4.8%. Note: ED is binding — you commit to attending if admitted.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 77% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 28% of the class submitted
93% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
Brown rates course rigor, your essay, and your recommendations as Very Important, and your activities as Important. Rigor means AP, IB, and dual enrollment carry real weight — make sure your mix of AP or IB courses is strong. The essay is weighted like your GPA. Choose recommenders who can be specific about you, not just confirm your transcript. And depth and leadership in a few activities matter more than a long list.
Student Life
66.4% of Brown classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At Brown, 66.4% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
8:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
From out of state (freshman class)
81.8%
Live on campus
75%
Men in fraternities
3%
Women in sororities
3%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
Brown's student body is 28.2% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
Brown graduates 74.8% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
Brown graduates 74.8% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
Brown
74.8%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $87,648
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
95.6%
Overall 6-yr rate
92.3%
Pell recipient rate
There's a 3.3 point gap between overall and Pell Grant graduation rates. Worth asking the school about support resources.
Freshman Retention
98.8%
98.8% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Providence.
Providence is Rhode Island's capital and, at just under 191,000 people, New England's third-largest city — compact enough to cover mostly on foot. Brown's campus sits in College Hill, a walkable historic neighborhood it shares with RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), a short walk from Federal Hill's Italian restaurant district downtown. It's a real small city with its own identity rather than a satellite of Boston, though Boston is close enough (about an hour by car) to be a regular day trip.
Notable Alumni
John Hay
Private secretary to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, later served as U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
Class of 1858
Janet Yellen
First woman to chair the Federal Reserve (2014–2018) and first woman to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary (2021–2025); graduated summa cum laude in economics.
Class of 1967
Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO of Uber since 2017, after leading Expedia for over a decade; graduated in electrical engineering.
Class of 1991
Emma Watson
Actress best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, graduated in English literature.
Class of 2014
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Mid-size city
Providence, RI
Best For
Traditions
Campus Dance
Traces back to 1856 senior 'Class Day' celebrations on the Green; dancing became the central feature by 1886. Now held during Commencement/Reunion Weekend, it draws thousands of alumni across generations, capped by the midnight Senior Sing on the steps of Sayles Hall.
Spring Weekend
A campus-wide weekend of concerts, contests and shows each spring, founded in 1950 as the successor to the university's wartime-lapsed Junior Week and Promenade tradition, which dated back to 1898.
Josiah's
The campus snack bar is named for Josiah Stinkney Carberry, a fictional professor invented as a 1929 prank and 'known' for his made-up field of psychoceramics — the study of cracked pots — a joke the university has kept alive for nearly a century.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Providence
Newport, RI
About 45 minutesGilded Age mansions, the Cliff Walk, and a compact, walkable sailing town on Narragansett Bay.
Cape Cod, MA
About 1 hour 15 minutesBeaches and classic New England summer towns.
Boston
About 1 hourA bigger city for the weekend, straight up I-95.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Rhode Island T.F. Green International (PVD)
About 15 minutes from campus
For international flights: Boston Logan International (BOS) — about 1 hour by road.
Pro sports nearby
- Providence Bruins AHL
- Rhode Island FC USL Championship
- Boston Red Sox MLBAbout 1 hour away
- Boston Celtics NBAAbout 1 hour away
Career Proximity
Providence's own economy is modest, so Boston — about an hour north — is the real internship market for finance, consulting and tech, while Brown's own teaching hospitals anchor a local health care and biotech presence.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Rhode Island Hospital
- Brown University Health
- CVS Health
- Citizens Financial Group
- Bank of America
Boston, about 1 hour north by road
Who Thrives Here
Brown admits 6.3% of applicants overall and 17.9% through early decision, and requires the SAT or ACT — a score is part of the application here, not an option. Its defining structure is the Open Curriculum, adopted in 1969: there are no distribution or core requirements outside a student's concentration (major), just 30 courses and a completed concentration to graduate, and any course can be taken Satisfactory/No Credit instead of a letter grade — an S carries no GPA effect, an NC doesn't appear on the transcript at all. That freedom to explore comes with a real trade-off: only 74.8% of students graduate in four years, well behind the 95.6% who finish within six — a wider gap than most peer Ivies, plausibly a byproduct of a curriculum built around exploration rather than a fixed sequence. Financially the school is generous: 100% of demonstrated need is met, 47.5% of undergraduates receive need-based aid, and graduates who borrow leave owing $36,263 on average. Socially, Greek life is a small minority presence (3% of men, 3% of women) against 75% of undergraduates in college housing, and the surrounding campus sits in Providence's College Hill neighborhood — a walkable small city rather than a big-city grid.