Brown vs. Amherst: Which College Has a More Flexible Open Curriculum?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Brown pairs an almost completely self-designed course plan with the scale of a research university, while Amherst offers nearly the same freedom in a smaller liberal-arts setting with access to the Five College Consortium. Neither school makes students complete a conventional general-education or distribution core. At both, your major, called a concentration at Brown, will still impose its own requirements.

Brown’s Open Curriculum is slightly more flexible in its formal structure. There are no campus-wide subject-area requirements: a student can, for example, take courses across philosophy, computer science, visual art, and public policy without having to check off science, language, history, or social-science categories. Brown students must complete their concentration and writing requirements, but concentrations can be interdisciplinary, and the university’s Satisfactory/No Credit option gives students additional room to explore.

Amherst also has no distribution requirements, so students are not required to sample prescribed academic fields outside the major. Its first-year seminar and writing expectations add some structure, and its smaller course catalog means the choices on campus may be less extensive than Brown’s in a given term. However, Amherst students can take courses at Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass Amherst through the Five College Consortium, which can substantially broaden options.