Is Cornell or Brown better for an open curriculum?

Brown is the clearer choice if your priority is maximum academic freedom. Its Open Curriculum is a defining feature of the school: there are no general education distribution requirements, and students usually have a lot of room to shape their studies across departments. Brown also uses the S/NC option in a way that supports exploration, so trying a class outside your comfort zone can feel lower-stakes.

That freedom is real in day-to-day course planning. Aside from concentration requirements, writing requirements, and any prerequisites for particular classes, Brown students are not being moved through a common core. If you want to combine, say, computer science, philosophy, and visual art without a long checklist of required categories, Brown is built for that.

Cornell can offer meaningful flexibility, but it depends heavily on which undergraduate college you are in. The College of Arts and Sciences gives students a fair amount of choice, yet it still has distribution and breadth expectations. Other Cornell colleges, especially the more professionally oriented ones like Engineering, Human Ecology, or ILR, often have more structured requirements tied to the field.

So Cornell works well for a student who wants some room to explore but also likes having a clearer academic framework. In practice, many Cornell students can take classes across disciplines, but they are usually doing that within a more defined set of college and major requirements than at Brown.

If your main question is which school lets you explore without being locked into distribution rules, Brown has the more open system by a wide margin. Cornell can be flexible in certain colleges, but it is not open-curriculum in the same sense, and your freedom there will be shaped much more by the specific college you enter.