Which has a more flexible open curriculum, Yale or Brown?

The main practical difference is that Brown lets you use far more of your four years on courses you choose, while Yale requires students to sample broad academic areas and complete specified skills requirements. That freedom makes it easier to combine unrelated interests, take many electives, or change academic direction without needing to fit in preset categories.

Yale is flexible compared with many colleges, but it is not an open curriculum in Brown’s sense. Yale College students must satisfy distributional requirements across the humanities and arts, social sciences, and sciences, along with skills requirements such as quantitative reasoning, writing, and foreign language. Those requirements still leave substantial room for exploration, especially through electives and interdisciplinary majors, but they ensure every student takes coursework outside their primary field.

For the specific goal of minimizing general education requirements and designing the most self-directed academic path, Brown is the clearer choice. Yale may be more appealing if you want exploration to be built into your education through a structured breadth requirement rather than left almost entirely to your own planning.