#52 Brown University

Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.

At its foundation, Brown was the first college in the United States to accept students regardless of their religious affiliation. Its engineering program was established in 1847 and was the first in the Ivy League. It was one of the early doctoral-granting U.S. institutions in the late 19th century, adding master and doctoral studies in 1887. Brown’s New Curriculum is sometimes referred to in education theory as the Brown Curriculum and was adopted by faculty vote in 1969 after a period of student lobbying. The New Curriculum eliminated mandatory “general education” distribution requirements, made students “the architects of their own syllabus” and allowed them to take any course for a grade of satisfactory or unrecorded no-credit. In 1971, Brown’s coordinate women’s institution Pembroke College was fully merged into the university and Pembroke Campus now includes dormitories and classrooms used by all of Brown.