the_geographer

From what I understand, "ranking" matters much less than placement history. Prestigious schools often have good placements because of their prestige--but not always. Some departments post their recent placements, others don't. Rankings (in my view) are somewhat capricious and not really indicative of anything objective about the institution or department. Placements, on the other hand, are concrete job outcomes for the people who go there. The other thing is that the uneven badness of the job market is also very field-dependent. It's not just the quantity of jobs in each subfield but the ratio of candidates to jobs. So, for instance, even though there are generally a lot of jobs in American history, 20th century US history is (so I've heard) one of the worst job markets because so many grad students are focusing on it right now. Of course, all of that only really matters from the jobs perspective. I don't really think the experience of doing a phd at an Ivy is actually in any objective way better than doing it somewhere less "prestigious."

I could be mistaken. I thought I heard that they sometimes do interviews but may be confusing it with another program. At any rate, I was just curious.

Applied, have heard nothing yet. Does anyone know if they interview everyone they are interested in?

For anyone else who applied to Brown, I got an email from my POI in early December saying that this year they are only doing interviews with people who have not already spoken (by phone or zoom, presumably) with someone in the department. So if you already talked with someone in the department you won't be contacted for an interview request even if they are interested in you.