India is part of Asia.
2 Likes
My bad! Asia is huge, and I guess in my rush to post, I mixed continent with countries ! Thank goodness my kids are smarter than me!!
Thanks for letting me know. I tweaked my post. I just wanted to reflect the kids we saw that’s all for anyone looking at the school.
We been to Rice more than twice and we had totally different experience.
The two presentations we attended, and tour guides we had for the several tours we participated, never empathized the residential college rivalry like Greek life. They were explained as few competitions between colleges, but mostly events were organized as individual residential college gatherings/festivals.
Although 30% of the student body is Asian, the tours we did had more non-minority, also the same around the campus while we were there. Wife even mentioned the university was too bland (races wise) and lack flavor.
I guess it just depends on the tour that day?
I am not sure what bland/lacks flavour means to you, but we saw many flavours! On our tour day, we were definitely the minority (European). It just wasn’t a fit for our kid! The ‘vibe’ was not there, that’s why I love reading these posts. It gives people a perspective if they can’t get to the campus.
We like multi-flavor, as a reflection to our communities.
It was indeed weird that the several tours we have attended had similar vibes… even felt spooky. That was actually one of the concerns we had based on what we saw, especially when our state government (we are from Texas) has banned DEI programs.
This is so true. I know Yale makes prospective tour guides audition and it is a paid job. I’m sure other schools do the same, and if they don’t they should!
My son is a tour guide at UCB (they call them ambassadors). After they get through the hiring process, the training process is also very involved. They have to study a lot of information about the university and take tests until they have a sufficient command of the material, write their own tour script and have it approved, and give practice tours (with feedback from others) until they are considered ready to run their own tours. That’s just the training for the tour part of their jobs; they do lots of other work for the visitor center and campus events as well. 
Because so much training goes into each ambassador, new ambassadors must commit to working their first summer, and also commit to a certain amount of hours during the school year. It’s a substantial campus job. It’s been good for my son, though!
10 Likes
Our experience was exactly the same - but these were all the reasons my daughter loved it! I was worried that socially she could outgrown the “Harry Potter” aspect, but she is a kid who would eat that all up. It was interesting on the tour to see half the kids were enthralled, and others just checked out.
4 Likes
My son was a “docent” at Denison, and it was a great experience, although Covid made it a little arduous when the school moved to a one-family per tour model. It’s my impression that Denison strikes a happy medium between overprogramming the docents and letting them run wild. There is a fairly intensive interview process and then training, including practice tours. No real “scripts,” however, as different families are interested in different things. When there are no tours happening when a docent is on duty, they help out with other Admissions tasks. I’ve always thought it would be interesting if the tour guides from various schools would share their thoughts here, kind of “the view from the other side”.
2 Likes
Yes, at UCB each ambassador writes their own script as part of training, but they don’t need to follow this script on a tour; they customize tours as they give them. They also give custom group tours to school groups and people from organizations all over the world, so there is a wide repertoire of tour types they learn to do.
At UCB the admissions office is separate from the visitor center where the ambassadors work, but there are definitely lots of tasks at the visitor center for ambassadors while they are not giving tours. My son says they also get all kinds of questions at the front desk and on the phones. He thinks it’s an interesting job with lots of variety.
That would be an interesting thread!
1 Like
I was an admissions host at my college back in the dark ages! We had to apply for the position and there was extensive training. I loved giving tours! The biggest perk was a single room since we hosted overnight visits.
1 Like
Just picking up on the comments about WUSTL, I think this captures something that can be hard to explain to people who wonder why it is considered so desirable by some kids, when it doesn’t appear to have the very top rankings for any given department. But the thing I think it does so well is transcend that whole structure. It offers really exciting, thoughtful, well-resourced programs for pretty much everything it does, not just its “top” areas, and then it makes it easy to connect and combine between the many different things it does.
Of course lots of colleges do that to some degree. But I think WUSTL is really far in that direction, particularly for a university versus an LAC. And unlike an LAC, it does have the full resources of an R1/AAU research university. Pretty cool.
7 Likes
@tamagotchi OSU grad here. It’s been awhile but it was a great school.
1 Like
If it makes you feel better, according to the latest CDS (2022-2023), the number of Asian (29%) and White, non-Hispanic (28%) students at Rice are roughly the same. Black students make up roughly 8% of the undergraduate population, and Hispanic/Latino students stand at 15%. There are only 3 (three!) Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander students and 5 (five!) American Indian or Alaska Native students. So, if you are White or Asian, you can rest assured you will not feel in the minority. One could easily exist without ever having a student in their class that is not white or Asian. It seems the tour group was not representative of the university’s student body.
1 Like
ENROLLED DOMESTIC STUDENTS BY ETHNICITY (BASED ON FEDERAL DEFINITIONS)
| ETHNICITY | % OF ENROLLED DOMESTIC STUDENTS |
|---|---|
| Asian American | 34% |
| Caucasian | 27% |
| Hispanic or Latino | 21% |
| African American or Black | 9% |
| Multiracial | 7% |
| Other | 2% |
According to the student profile for the class of 2027 the above is a reflection of the student body, although the 143 international students are listed separately.
However, it honestly doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t need the reassurance. I was merely stating my observation of the students we encountered on campus (not the tour group by the way) in order to be informative as I had no idea before I stepped foot on campus.
Rice really is a great melting pot of students, and I was not intending for my comments on the student profile to be dissected so much! My focus on the report of my visit was on the residential college system, and how it would not suit my son!
I appreciate your reply.
You’ll notice I was referring to total undergraduate enrollment as listed on the Common Data Set. I did not look at individual class years.
I was posting the information because I thought it was important for future parents and students looking at Rice. Others are often interested in information on campus diversity for different reasons. I wanted to provide accurate information.
I understand. My focus was not solely on diversity, but on other aspects of life at Rice University.
In addition to the post above, I was responding to your original post on the other thread before the two edits. That referenced diversity.
Yes - it referenced diversity in that I pointed out the student body we encountered. As stated before, my post focussed primarily on the residential college system. The only edits I made were to change Asia/Indian/Black/Hispanic to Asia American/African American/Hispanic, as another poster mentioned that India was in Asia!!
It’s funny my kid almost had the same reaction to Skidmore. We snuck out half way through the tour but he loved the town of Saratoga. We had visited Union College the same day and he loved the school not the town. If Union was in Saratoga not Schenectady, it might have been his top choice.