Brown University Area Apartments for Rent

Do Brown University students smile a lot? After all, their school was named by the 2010 Princeton Review as the number one college in America for “Happiest Students.”

They could be happy about the enormous amount of academic freedom they are given under “the Brown Curriculum.” The university’s experimental curriculum is based on the results of a year-long search for ways to improve education for students at Brown and to “teach students how to think rather than just teaching facts.”

The new curriculum eliminated core requirements and changed the grading system, eliminating the grade of “D,” among other things. That has to account for happier students!

Founded in 1764, before America’s independence and early in the reign of King George III, Brown was one of the first colleges in the original thirteen colonies. Today, the Providence, Rhode Island institution is a leading Ivy-league research university with 6,000 undergraduates, 2,000 graduate students and 400 medical school students. The school offers undergraduate degrees in more than 70 concentrations, ranging from Egyptology to cognitive neuroscience. The university’s commitment to undergraduate freedom means anything is possible at Brown.

Notable alumni include Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal; Stephen Hopkins, Continental Congress delegate and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence; Ken Starr, special counsel in the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings; Ted Turner, billionaire founder of CNN, expelled from Brown in 1960; John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Ira Glass, host and producer of NPR’s This American Life; Dhani Harrison, son of Beatle George Harrison; and Emma Watson, actress in the Harry Potter film series.