TOW #6 "Brown By The Numbers" College Information Brochure

This weekend I went to visit a few colleges and one of them was Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. While there I picked up a brochure called "Brown By The Numbers" offering basic information about Brown University. The brochure includes an introduction to Brown, a lot of statistics and facts about the university in several different categories, a brief description of the campus, a collection of images, and an explanation of how financial aid is managed at the school. Ultimately, the purpose of the brochure is to pique a potential student's interest and to get him or her to apply to Brown. It uses a variety of different strategies to appeal to college-searching high school students and their parents. The main appeal generated is ethos, and the brochure uses a lot of statistics and numbers to do so. For example, it provides the student to faculty ratio, the breakdown of class sizes, the racial and regional breakdown of the class of 2017, and the amount of financial aid distributed to students this year. All these numbers are facts that prospective college students and their families are considering, and it boosts Brown's ethos to show off small class sizes, a diverse student body, and it's generosity with financial aid. Some of the numbers it offers create appeals to pathos and logos as well. For example, Brown advertises that it was ranked fourth in Newsweek's survey of the happiest college students in the US. This appeals to the ethos of prospective students, because they desire a school where they are going to be happy, as well as logos because the logic dictates that if Brown's students are happy, and one attends Brown, one will have a happy college experience. Though the numbers are the main focus of the brochure, it also appeals to ethos and pathos in it's introduction by comparing college education to a journey, and then characterizing the "academic journey" at Brown versus at other schools. For example, the brochure states "students at Brown have more opportunity to define their own education than do students at any other American university," (p. 2). According to Brown, at other schools the journey is predefined and never changing, but at Brown it is open and flexible and based on students decisions. This appeals to ethos, because it argues that Brown has more opportunities for students than other colleges, and it appeals to pathos because it bases it's argument on the assumption that students desire choice and freedom. Finally, the brochure provides images to illustrate it's facts and arguments.

Here is a link I found to an online copy of the brochure: http://www.brown.edu/admission/undergraduate/sites/brown.edu.admission.undergraduate/files/uploads/BrownByNumbers.pdf