Is Vanderbilt the New Brown?

A well-respected but sleepy university goes on a building spree, gets an injection of new talent, and promises a rigorous but chill education. Now top students from near and far are lining up at the gate. Stop us if you've heard this one before

-  NICOLE LAPORTE

When Emma Brownrigg was applying to college in the fall of 2022, she got used to an avalanche of thick envelopes arriving in the mail. “I would get letters that were like, ‘Come to duh-duh-duh school.’ It was like that throughout my senior year.”

But one school’s communication was a little different. Marketing brochures from Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, had a distinctly warm-and-fuzzy vibe. “They were really well-put-together packages. They’d send letters, stickers. It was just very seemingly thoughtful stuff,” says Brownrigg, who was a top student at her public high school in Santa Monica. “I can’t say that a lot of other schools I applied to did that.”

Indeed, mailings from institutions like Princeton and Duke had more of a “ ‘You need to pursue us’ kind of feel,” says Brownrigg’s mother. “I didn’t get an elitist sense from Vanderbilt, even though, obviously, it is.”

This welcoming attitude from a top-ranked university—Vanderbilt was then number 13 on the U.S. News and World Report annual college list—sealed the deal for Brownrigg after she was rejected by her top choice, Duke. That and the fact that Vanderbilt was not a “middle-of-nowhere college.” Also: Shorts and T-shirts could be worn throughout the year. “I did not want New England winters,” she says. “It kind of checked all the boxes. Of course, prestige was something that was really important to me.”