Students at Brown University were recently deemed the happiest in the nation by the Princeton Review. I attended Brown from 1988 through 1990, graduating with a degree in History and a few credits short of a double major in Fine Art, and I was pretty happy myself, most of the time. In general I don't think college rankings are a good thing--they reduce an incredibly complex institution to a single number, they create a phony sense of objectivity, and they're useless when determining whether a particular school is the right place for a particular student.
But if we're going to rank our universities, by all means let's include students' happiness in the mix. According to the Princeton Review, their "Happiest Students" list, like most of their rankings, was derived from the results of an 80-question survey completed by 115,000 students--an average of 350 per school). (I have no idea whether this is an effective way of measuring happiness, but that sure sounds like a lot of data, doesn't it? And Lord knows we Americans--especially those of us with the opportunity to spend time at places like Brown--find a great deal of comfort in data, so let's at least pretend that there's some validity to the process.)
So why was I happy at Brown? Well, for starters I felt very lucky to be there. I had an up-and-down freshman year at Duke, which has many strengths as a university but was not the right place for me, and then spent two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I worked my ass off and got my head together before deciding I wanted to return to college. In a fit of youthful exuberance, I decided that Brown was the only place for me, and it was the only school to which I applied. (Thank God they took me.)
And why did I think Brown would be only place for me? Because after living on my own in Boston, and after working as a laborer, truck driver, and copy clerk to help support myself while I was in art school, and--most importantly--after having the freedom that the Museum School afforded me to create my own curriculum and select my own classes, I needed to attend a school that would treat me like an adult and let me make my own decisions. And that was Brown's philosophy in a nutshell.
I haven't been back to Providence in a long time, but I have to assume that Brown still gives its students more than enough rope to hang themselves plenty of latitude to chart their own course. And independence alone may not be enough to make you happy, but I don't know how you can be happy without it.
