<p>Seems like you made up your mind before asking the question if you exclusively agree with the one person of five who responds.</p>
<p>As a newly-minted graduate, I can say the following:
- No way in hell are you going to live on campus all four years at a state school. Rice guarantees housing for 3 of 4 years. Most colleges have an entire class go off at a time (ex. Martel gives juniors the last spot in the housing draw), so you’re essentially guaranteed to have roommates. The surrounding neighborhood has a good number of garage apartments and complexes if you don’t have a car, often for less than what it costs to live on campus. Colleges often mandate that college government members live on campus, so there are ways around the year off.
- All first year science lecture classes are huge no matter where you go. They’re big at Princeton and Yale and the University of Texas, and they’re big at Rice. Rice breaks these classes into study sessions in groups of 15-20 for personalized attention. I NEVER had a class where someone had to sit on the floor - in fact, my intro physics class of ~150 people occasionally had as few as 40 show up because it was at 9 am.
- Top colleges are pressured to keep class sizes small because that helps them rise in the rankings.
- I’ve gotten into every single overenrolled class I wanted by explaining to the professor why I was interested and asking for a signature.</p>