<p>Indeed, youdon’tsay. After our very enjoyable recent visit to Rice it’s very high on our list too. It would be interesting to know if this larger pool is, overall, as qualified as last year’s, which would indicate that Rice is simply becoming a more attractive school to highly accomplished students. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case.</p>
<p>In any case the planned increase in the freshman class size will somewhat ameliorate the effect of the larger pool on the applicants.</p>