Brown University is known colloquially as the “happy Ivy.” But is there any truth behind this moniker? According to a 2022 poll by The Brown Daily Herald and the Brown Opinion Project, the answer is maybe. Indeed, 25% of students surveyed indicated they were “very happy,” and 56% stated they were “somewhat happy.” In comparison, less than 10% of students stated that they were very or somewhat unhappy. Case closed? We at Ivy Coach don’t think so!

Without any accurate comparative data, it’s a tough sell to claim that Brown is the “happiest” of the Ivies. Perhaps 40% of the students over at Dartmouth College would identify as very happy. Who knows! Maybe Brown actually has the lowest relative percentage of very or somewhat happy students. A few years ago, we called The Brown Daily Herald out for marshaling a similar poll as evidence that Brown students were the happiest in the Ivy League. This time around, they haven’t made such lofty claims but have tied the relative happiness of Brown’s students to various tranquil locations on campus. 

It’s a quaint idea, but it comes across as the rhetoric you would see in a Brown marketing brochure rather than hardline journalism. That’s why we were pleased to see that a 2023 episode of the student-run Bruno Brief podcast broke down where this happiness myth may come from and how true it really is.

Brown Has a Laid-Back Culture – Unique Within the Ivy League!

The Bruno Brief podcast raises some interesting points about happiness at Brown. They point to several factors that may contribute to Brown’s sunny reputation: its collaborative culture, Open Curriculum, and lenient grading system. These are all fair points, but we would like to add a few more: the power of self-selection and self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Brown does not have the cutthroat competitive culture found at its Ivy neighbor to the north in Cambridge. One is much more likely to see students pooling resources and discussing leisure activities in Brown’s dining halls than comparing test scores (an activity par for the course at other elite schools with more rigorous academic cultures!). 

Brown’s famous Open Curriculum, in which all students get to choose every last class they take, means that no student can ever claim they are enrolled in a class they would rather not be taking. Since the advent of the Open Curriculum, Brown has also refused to calculate student GPAs, taking yet another load off of the student body. Considering that some other schools cultivate pressure cooker environments where Bs cause a crisis, this lenient academic policy should not be taken for granted.

Is Brown the Happy Ivy, or Is It Playing the Role It Has Been Assigned?

Ivy Coach would like to add its voice to this conversation. While the above mentioned factors certainly affect student happiness, some more subtle ones might also be at play. Isn’t it possible that Brown’s reputation for happiness draws a specific type of student — one who goes about life at their own pace and tries to see the bright side of things — to campus? This is a form of self-selection bias in which people join groups with the same characteristics as themselves.

Furthermore, who’s to say that students are not just playing a role they’ve been assigned, one that tells them to always keep a smile on their faces? Some students on the podcast describe social pressure on campus to keep things positive. When considered on a campus-wide scale, this could suggest that part of Brown’s happiness reputation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, the research necessary to probe these intricacies of the student psyche is hard to come by, much less the kind of comparative research that would settle once and for all whether Brown is truly the “Happy Ivy.” It’s fair to say that Brown’s students generally have a cheerful disposition, but things get tricky when other elite schools are considered.