Origins
About Us
Our Philosophy
Brook ReportTM is an independent data-driven analytics service founded by Mitchell Brook in 2020. Infused in our analytic process is our philosophy that higher education should engage students in a learning process that provides:
- in-depth knowledge and analytic skills;
- preparation for success and happiness in a society and economy that is increasingly diverse.
Good college learning naturally focuses on the classroom and research lab, but we believe a top ranked institution also achieves an environment allowing all students to grow their ability to navigate and flourish in a diverse and complex world with people of various backgrounds, abilities and perspectives on life.
With our college ratings service, we endeavor to provide information with real-world utility, from academic value, to resume value, to factoring social and emotional growth for success and happiness in the real world, outside academia. Regarding the latter, we believe that providing a diverse environment is absolutely necessary, with full diversity consistent with the nation as a whole, including racial, ethnic, gender, preference, viewpoint and economic diversity. Ironically as communications have exploded, interaction outside personal silos has declined, and we believe outstanding universities play an important role in tempering such negative impacts. This means we are methodically rolling out real-world rankings of universities in every major field of study based on these criteria.
“My goal in creating the Brook Report is to disrupt traditional survey-based methodologies for ranking colleges, replacing them with real-world actionable information.”
Our Methodology
Our Real-Rank™ methodology relies upon an innovative data set, and original data weighting analyses in order to provide clear distinctions between educational institutions.
All too often traditional college ratings are based upon surveys of professors, and artificially inflated admissions acceptance percentages, or other subjective indicators that do not always reflect the needs of students, parents and alumni in assessing the real-world value offered by the institutions being ranked. Such traditional “reputational” rankings have a way of being self-sustaining – being thought of highly, because of a high ranking, which in turn reinforces the survey data producing the high ranking!
Although our methodology takes into account such traditional “reputation” values, our error-correcting analyses are designed to unwind the impact of tradition in incorrectly skewing the data and producing incorrect ranking results.
Broadly speaking our main factors are:
- Academic program.
- Diversity – racial, socio-economic, social, viewpoint mixing.
- Traditional institutional reputation.
- Objective institutional renown data.
(Our methodology weights more heavily factors impacting preparation of young people for constructive participation in a diverse society, the real-world, where people of different backgrounds and therefore diverse world-views come together whether in the workplace or social settings. Weighting percentages may vary depending upon the specific field being analyzed).
Our Founder, Mitchell P. Brook
Mitchell is a graduate MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school he worked as an engineer for the company building the Space Shuttle. As an intellectual property attorney since the 1980s, he advised inventors, emerging companies and international companies on their strategies for product and brand protection.
As a father of a college applicant and student he became disappointed with the lack of solid information available to students and parents for real guidance to which college programs would provide real after-college value, real-world value.
“For me, starting the Brook Report and developing its methodologies is a way to give back to the community the experience I gained in my career, and in guiding young family members on their college journeys.”
Thus the vision for the Brook Report was born. How to quantify the after college value, before you even get into the college? How do you focus on the “college of your dreams” with no good basis to guide such decisions. What is real-world value beyond academic study, research papers? How to factor in real-world criteria such as resume value, and providing a diverse environment to grow into a person who can succeed in life, whether developing the skill to be happy and to succeed in a diverse world, working with people of different backgrounds and nurturing a balanced personal life.
Independence
We do not accept referral fees or direct advertising from colleges. We do not accept paid links or commission ad placements. Brook Report does not endorse any particular institution. We are ad supported from such advertising services as Google Adsense, and ads for colleges may appear through those services.
Savvy * Disrupting * Diverse