Popularity of Rice

breeze
Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:07:53 +0000

I didn’t go to either school, but Duke is in no way above or equal to Rice. It is more heard of because of its basketball team, but the school does virtually nil research compared to Rice. Rice has more National Merit Scholars than Duke in absolute numbers but has less than 1/2 the overall students. You do the math.

As for reputations, it depends if you care what the uneducated masses think about colleges (Harvard is fo’ real! Those people are totally smart and stuff from what I hear!!) or if you’d rather go to a school that combines the intimacy of a liberal arts college with the scholarship of a major research university. Rice has as good a reputation at most departments of Harvard or Stanford as… well, Harvard or Stanford.

Rice is really the only university of its kind. Harvard is not anything like it in terms of size or attention, and neither is Dartmouth for that matter. But Rice does more serious research than Dartmouth and Duke combined.

By the way, I went to UVa for undergrad but would probably like to go to Rice for grad school. So you can call me biased if I get in, yet I am going to go there only because I have decided it is the best college in most every aspect and I have the grades/scores/experience to be picky and more or less choose the school I will attend among all possible options.