From the overturn of race-based affirmative action to changes in standardized test requirements, the past two decades of undergraduate admissions at Brown have seen numerous changes.

The Herald analyzed incoming first-year admissions data from 2004 to 2024 using the University’s publicly available common data sets.

Brown consistently receives more female applicants than men. But the admitted class is evenly split.

The number of female first-year applicants to Brown over the last two decades has remained consistently higher than the number of male applicants. For the incoming first-year class in 2024, around 30,000 prospective female students applied, while the University only saw applications from about 19,000 male students. But the admitted class is evenly split by gender.

According to Sara Harberson, a former associate dean of admissions at Penn, “one of the biggest institutional priorities for colleges is keeping the male/female ratio balanced.”

The University’s incoming first-year acceptance rate for female applicants has consistently been lower than the acceptance rate for men over two decades. “What ends up happening is that most colleges in this situation overcompensate and manipulate the ratio by admitting men at a higher rate than women,” Harberson wrote in an email to The Herald.

In 2004, the acceptance rate for men was about 19%, while the acceptance rate for women was around 14.8%. In 2024, the acceptance rate for men was 7%, and the acceptance rate for women was around 4.4%.

The share of Asian students has increased over the past two decades

White students made up approximately 54% of the 2004 admitted class, with Asian or Pacific Islander students making up the second largest share at just 14%. In 2024, white students accounted for 31% of the admitted class and Asian or Pacific Islander students came in at a much closer second of 27%.

For the past two decades, American Indian or Alaska Native students have consistently accounted for the smallest share of each incoming class at under 1%.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court overturned race-based affirmative action, ruling that colleges and universities could not consider race in admissions. But according to Harberson, “A college’s admissions office doesn’t need racial checkboxes to determine or guess a student’s race.” She noted that information such as name, home address, activities, high school and essays could inform admissions officers about an applicant’s racial background.

“While admissions officers aren’t formally commenting on a student’s race for fear of being investigated, everyone around the table of an admissions committee is ‘in the know,’” Harberson added.

Cathleen Sheils, former director of undergraduate admissions at Cornell and a senior associate director of college counseling at Solomon Admissions Consulting, said that while the admissions officers don’t see race data due to the overturn of affirmative action, they are still “looking at a student’s life experiences” when forming a class of accepted students.

Early decision applications have grown dramatically, but the number of ED admits has only increased slightly

The University began ED admissions in 2001, in part to reduce the workload for admissions officers due to the increasing volume of early applicants. Prior to that, Brown had an early action policy, meaning that applicants could apply to other private universities early as well.

In 2004, there were about 1,900 ED applicants. In recent years, there has been a drastic increase in the number of ED applicants, with a significant upward trend starting in 2018 and a peak of 6,787 ED applicants in 2023. The number of students accepted early has only increased by about 350 since 2004.

According to Harberson, during the early years of ED applications, “the only students who knew about the tremendous advantages of applying ED were those coming from highly educated families, private schools and those whose families were in the upper echelon of earnings.”

In recent years, more students from a diverse range of backgrounds are learning about ED applications and are aware that “your chances of admission increase,” compared to regular decision, she wrote.

While Harberson was unsure of the exact reason behind this trend, she said she believes that social media has been a contributing factor in increasing applicants’ knowledge about ED admissions.

Financial aid packages have kept up with rising tuition costs

The mean first-year financial aid package has kept up with rising tuition costs. Dean of Financial Aid Sean Ferns highlighted University initiatives such as the Brown Promise — which replaced student loans with scholarships — and the Book/Course Materials Support Program — which covers course expenses for Brown University Scholarship-eligible students — as key programs that have “enhanced aid offers.”

Ferns added that from 2004 to 2024, “although the overall percentage of covered costs has remained similar during that time, the number of students who receive University Scholarship has increased significantly.”

According to Ferns, the percentage of students awarded any aid before 2021 remained steady at around 43%, but has “steadily increased since then and currently is at 48%.”

The number of enrolled first-years applying for financial aid has increased over time, with many years seeing extreme fluctuations in the number of applicants. The largest difference in the number of first-years applying for financial aid compared to the number awarded aid came in 2020, with 256 first-year students who applied for aid not receiving an award.

Over the past two decades, the direct cost of attending Brown has doubled

Tuition has increased dramatically in the past 20 years, more than doubling from around $32,000 to $71,700 from 2004 to 2024. In this time window, the average cost of other direct costs — including housing, books and supplies, required first-year fees and food — has also more than doubled.

According to Ferns, direct costs of attending Brown — tuition, fees, housing and meals — are approved by the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, based on recommendations given by the University Resources Committee, a group of students, faculty, staff and administration.

Indirect costs, such as books and supplies, are approved by the Department of Education. The University uses “publicly available information, such as regional cost-of-living data,” in addition to “information derived from Brown-initiated programs, such as the International Travel Pilot and the Book/Course Material Support Program” to estimate these costs, Ferns wrote.

“The goal is to provide a realistic budgetary framework that covers essential costs — such as laundry, personal care and local transit — while maintaining compliance with federal ‘reasonable cost’ standards” and may vary each year, he added.

The gap between the 75th and 25th percentiles for standardized test scores has shrunk

Brown’s 25th and 75th percentile ACT Scores have been on the rise in the past two decades, with the 25th percentile rising from 27 to 34 and the 75th percentile rising from 32 to 35 from 2004 to 2024, respectively.

The University went test-optional in 2020 during the pandemic and continued that policy through 2024. During this time, the gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles of ACT scores shrank significantly — and the same trend held true across sections of the SAT.

The Common Data Sets with information on ACT and SAT scores for first-year students admitted in 2025 under the reinstated test-required policy have not yet been released.

According to Harberson, national average SAT test scores have fallen, but the test scores of admitted and enrolled students at schools like Brown have increased.

Harberson believes this is because universities “favor students with higher scores to not only keep their average test scores consistent, but on the rise.”

She called test-optional policies “a farce,” emphasizing that colleges used “that policy to attract more applications while clearly favoring students with high test scores instead of treating students fairly in the process, regardless of whether they reported scores.”

Transfer student applications have grown, while the number admitted has remained steady

While the number of incoming transfer applicants to Brown has more than quadrupled since 2004, the number of transfer students admitted has remained relatively stable over time.

Harberson is also “seeing an uptick in the number of students wanting to transfer” in her advising business, adding that she believes that the pandemic has influenced the current generation of applicants.

“There is this growing sense among students that if you aren’t happy where you are, all you have to do is transfer,” she wrote, with “less patience among students to wait things out, get acclimated and realize the first college is a good fit.”

Harberson feels that recent students believe “getting into a better college will somehow solve everything,” she wrote.

“Some students are reaching out to me about transferring the moment they send in their enrollment deposit,” she wrote. “They think they'll have better odds of getting into an elite college as a transfer student rather than a high school senior. But sometimes the acceptance rate for transfer students is even lower than the freshman acceptance rate.”