Barnard or Rice for CS (+business/econ)

NiceUnparticularMan
Sat, 27 Apr 2024 11:28:34 +0000

So you might be interested in this study of the top 30 feeders to top 10 MBA programs, particularly the second list, the per capita list (since you are looking at small schools):

College Transitions – 17 Dec 22

Top Feeders to Business School - MBA Programs

College Transitions presents the top feeders for business that feed into the most desirable businesses and companies

Est. reading time: 2 minutes

Rice is #18 on the per capita list, which is very good since it is competing not just with universities but also LACs with a big business presence. In fact the only LACs ahead of it are CMC, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Wellesley, Colgate, and Swarthmore, which is not exactly a surprising list to people who know LACs that are plugged into business communities. The only universities ahead are Dartmouth, Chicago, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, Duke, Brown, Princeton, and Penn, again not a surprising list.

And per capita, Rice is actually ahead of universities like Cornell, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Tufts, and Columbia, which is quite impressive, and also LACs like Bowdoin, Pomona, Wesleyan, Colby, Washington and Lee, and Bates, which is also quite impressive. Finally, I note the study lists the top two destinations for each college, and with Rice it is Harvard and Northwestern, an interestingly diverse list.

Barnard in contrast did not make this top 30 list. To be clear, I don’t think means it is a bad choice for business. Indeed, I think a lot of that is just self-selection, as in people with business interests looking at NYC colleges might tend to choose a lot of other places besides Barnard for various reasons.

But still, my point is I would not be particularly worried about going to Rice if you were thinking about possible MBAs and such. In fact in general, it is an extremely well-regarded college by graduate programs and professional schools, and has national placement into such programs. So I think you would be happy with Rice if that ends up your path.

OK, so to me this is more about things like whether you would actually like being in a smaller women’s college, and living in NYC versus Houston for four years. Those are obviously very personal things so no one here can actually tell you what to think.

That said, I do believe it is important to understand that Houston is a huge city full of all sorts of interesting experience opportunities, things to do for fun, and so on, way more than you could ever exhaust in four years. NYC too, of course, but I personally believe past a certain point, even more stuff is kinda irrelevant since you couldn’t possibly get to more than a fraction of all that stuff anyway.

On the other hand, I think the weather is something to seriously consider. Obviously air conditioning has made the growth of large cities in Texas a possibility, and you won’t necessarily be there in the summer, and it is only four years anyway. But again, no one here can actually tell you what to think about that.