How altruistic are Brown graduates? In January, the Peace Corps gave one small hint when it released figures detailing which schools produced the largest numbers of volunteers last year. In the Ivy League only Cornell’s fifty-seven alumni exceeded Brown’s thirty-eight, numbers that put Cornell in fourth place among medium-sized schools and Brown in eleventh. Yale, with thirty-three volunteers, ranked fourteenth in the same category, while Penn’s twenty-eight placed it seventeenth, in a tie with Notre Dame. Harvard, with twenty-three volunteers, was one of five universities in the twenty-fourth spot.

At the top of the largest-schools group were the University of Wisconsin and the University of Colorado, the only institutions to graduate more than 100 Peace Corps volunteers in 2004; Wisconsin, in fact, has been number one on the list for more than a decade.