My daughter is a sophomore at Rice and she is from NJ. This is a question that had crossed my mind that Rice would be to Texan (of course nothing like Rutgers and NJ). My take on this is just that Texans love their state and don’t want to leave so Rice just gets a lot more applicants from Texas, and remember in any other context Texas would be large enough to be its own country with maybe three of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. in Texas, and if Rice just takes it’s best applicants a lot of those best are from Texas just because there are just so many of them. Even a place like Harvard takes the majority of it’s students from the northeast and if you laid the map of Texas over, it would cover the entire northeast . Anyway there are a lot of international students at Rice and I believe my daughter finds it satisfactorily diverse.