Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in the College Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, United States. The university is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. One of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution, it was the first American college to codify that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of the religious affiliation of students.