The End of Brown’s Undergraduate Era

Gray Bittker

Tantalized by graduate tuition dollars, President Paxson and the Brown Corporation are putting decades of undergraduate excellence on the chopping block, fundamentally disregarding what makes Brown University so special.

On December 17th, 2024, Brown University students and faculty received an announcement in the daily newsletter titled “Community actions for reducing the deficit”. While much of this proposal focused on limiting the growth of expenses in an effort to address Brown’s $46 million FY25 budget deficit, the fourth action item called for a doubling of residential masters student enrollment and increase in online learners to “offset slow undergraduate tuition growth.” This proposed increase in masters enrollment would make undergraduates a minority at Brown for the first time in the school’s 260-year history, and is a slap in the face to all the students who chose Brown for its undergraduate focus. Tantalized by graduate tuition dollars, President Paxson and the Brown Corporation are putting decades of undergraduate excellence on the chopping block, fundamentally disregarding what makes Brown University so special.

According to the Office of Institutional Research’s Enrollment Factbook, Brown has 7,226 undergraduates out of 11,232 total students. This puts Brown’s undergraduate percentage at 64.3% of the school, comparable to other elite undergraduate-focused schools like Dartmouth (65%) and Princeton (64%). Based on figures supplied by the Office of the Provost and the administration’s recent proposal, Brown’s undergraduate percentage will plummet to only 49.7% as residential masters student enrollment doubles from 1,560 to 3,120 students and online learners grow to 2,000 while undergraduate, PhD, and medical student enrollment remains relatively constant. This marks a seismic shift in Brown’s enrollment breakdown, and puts the University more in line with research-oriented institutions like Harvard, Yale, and MIT that have a graduate student majority.

While Harvard, Yale, and MIT are certainly good company, there’s no denying that Brown will struggle to compete against these behemoths as a research institution. According to Nature’s research output metrics, Brown faculty published 418 papers from December 2023 to November 2024; Harvard faculty published 3,883 in the same timeframe. Brown may not be able to compete with these schools in terms of research output, but it has found its niche in undergraduate education, and is consistently ranked as one of the top schools in the country in this category. This makes it all the more concerning to see Brown’s leadership so intent on shifting away from the tried-and-true undergraduate-focused model, instead trying to make Brown into something it never was and shouldn’t become. Brown isn’t Harvard, Yale, or MIT — Brown is Brown, and with that comes a unique identity worth more than any potential revenue from masters students.

December’s budgetary announcement claimed that much of this revenue will be reinvested in undergraduate education, but recent University actions suggest otherwise. This past year Brown announced a seven year, $150 million deal to rebrand the Lifespan health system as Brown University Health, after which Lifespan will reinvest $15 million a year not into Brown’s undergraduate programs but the Warren Alpert Medical School. In September, the University also announced the construction of a seven-story life sciences research facility, with much of the space slated to go towards faculty researchers rather than undergraduate instruction. The unspoken truth is that Brown will always have a steady stream of undergraduates to choose from, leaving little incentive for reinvestment into undergraduate programs and facilities. Instead, Brown will continue to spend millions of dollars on projects catering to graduate students who are better for the school’s bottom line.

The impacts of these and other projects will no doubt benefit some undergraduates engaging in research, though most of them will suffer as a result of Brown’s changing priorities. In addition to the proposed increase in master’s enrollment, the December budgetary announcement calls for decreased professor hiring, and it is likely that the limited professors who are hired will be chosen for their research rather than their teaching capabilities. Making matters worse, these professors will be teaching to classes with more and more masters students in them, giving undergraduates less time to interact with faculty and get help from undergraduate teaching assistants. Some of these teaching assistants might not even be undergraduates anymore, with a recent email from Vice Chair of the computer science department Tom Doeppner suggesting that fifth-year masters students will get preferential treatment in the undergraduate teaching assistant hiring process. This is a bewildering move given these positions are explicitly intended for undergraduates, and is indicative of what’s to come as Brown leaves undergraduates behind.

Throughout Brown’s ongoing transition towards becoming a research university, President Paxson and the corporation have created an idyllic vision of a school focused on research and undergraduates at the same time. It is perhaps not surprising that President Paxson has gravitated towards this narrative given she started her career at Princeton, a school that has succeeded in achieving the balance between research and undergraduate education Brown is aiming for. However, Brown is no Princeton, and one need not look further than the endowment to see why. At $7.2 billion, Brown’s endowment is hardly small, but it is only a fifth of Princeton’s, and recent cuts to NIH grants mean that Brown will have to find alternative sources of funding for projects like the life sciences research facility. The budget plan outlined in December’s deficit announcement makes clear that Brown intends to do this by pivoting away from undergraduates, destroying a defining characteristic of the school that has persisted for generations.

There’s no denying that Brown’s budgetary deficit is a real issue, but increasing graduate student enrollment is not the best way to address it. A doubling in masters students will create unnecessary strain on already limited university resources, and any additional revenues from graduate programs will go towards addressing the growing deficit rather than improving student life. While this article likely doesn’t present the full picture of these enrollment plans, Brown’s administration has been painfully opaque on how their proposals will impact the community, and the December budget deficit announcement is one of the only public mentions of a policy that will fundamentally change the university. Rather than bury their plans in lengthy emails, the administration needs to get community input on December’s budgetary proposal and seriously consider the consequences it will have on Brown’s reputation and mission. A failure to do so would destroy centuries of work done by generations of students, faculty, and administrators, leaving behind a husk of a university that once knew what it meant to be special.

Cover image courtesy of Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia Commons