How does Williams College admissions difficulty compare to Brown University?

Brown is usually seen as a bit harder to get into than Williams, though both are firmly in the extremely selective category. Brown gets a very large applicant pool, has broad name recognition as an Ivy, and attracts many students who are specifically drawn to the Open Curriculum. Williams is also highly selective, but people often think of it as competing at the very top of liberal arts college admissions rather than in exactly the same applicant market as Brown.

For a student who wants a medium-sized research university with the flexibility to explore across disciplines, Brown tends to be the tougher admit in everyday conversation.

For a student who is excited by a small residential college, close faculty access, and a campus culture centered on undergraduate teaching, Williams is one of the hardest places in the country to enter. In the liberal arts college world, it sits at the very top tier, and the admissions bar is still extremely high. The smaller size can also make fit matter a lot, since Williams is building a class for a very specific kind of academic and residential experience.

So in relative terms, most people would place Brown as slightly more difficult overall, but not by a huge margin that changes how you should approach the application. A realistic view is that both are reaches for almost everyone, and the more useful distinction is whether you are drawn to Brown’s university scale and curricular freedom or Williams’s intimate liberal arts environment.