Anybody know about parties at Rice? How often/how fun are they? How do they compare to Johns Hopkins?
Rice allows alcohol on campus and being a wet campus is done mostly for safety reasons. Our campus police department knows that they can have more control of situations and respond better in an emergency if parties are concentrated to campus; they would have less control if parties were at off-campus locations.
The majority of my friends drink at least occasionally. Parties are usually on weekends and people generally put class first. Our “crazy partiers” still tend to be good students. There is a lot of drinking of hard alcohol and lots of drinking games at these events, so I suppose there’s always potential to go overboard. But I really do believe in our Culture of Care; Rice students look out for each other. It is a relatively small community and so we take that Culture of Care seriously. I always feel like people help out those who are drinking too much. Also, I’ve never felt peer pressure to drink here. People respect non-drinkers, and non-drinkers still participate in party culture and have just as much fun.
Drugs aren’t a huge deal here. A specific subset of people smoke weed. I’ve only rarely heard about harder drugs.
Public parties are the big things, not big frat parties (none here).
Rice is ranked way lower than JHU and has no name recognition. I’d say choose JHU and rush/ join Greek life. You won’t regret it
http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/2/#tab:rank
By Forbes Rice ranked 32 Hopkins ranked 62.
https://colleges.niche.com/rankings/best-colleges/
By niche Rice ranked 5 Hopkins ranked 39
In the eyes of grad schools, employers, and well-informed others, Rice has plenty of name recognition. If, however, you want to rush a fraternity or sorority, agree that Rice would not be the pick. But OP does not seem to require Greek life.
https://best-colleges.time.com/money/full-ranking#/list
Money magazine ranks Rice 14 Hopkins 85
The reason why Hopkins consistently is ranked lower in other lists like Money Magazine, Forbes, and Niche and ranked so highly by US News is almost exclusively because alumni earning/ROI is taken into account by the first three and not by US News. I’m curious why Hopkins consistently has such low returns on 10 and 20 year outlooks compared to its peers, but I’m sure the mere fact that 25% of its student body goes into medicine has something to do with it. A premed student will spend (on average) 3-4 years after graduation before starting medical school (average age of med school matriculant is nearly 25 in the U.S.) with a minimum wage job (or getting a masters, etc.), and then once in medical school will not be earning a physician’s salary for another 6-10 years. Hopkins also does not produce anywhere near the same level of Wall Street recruits and finance-oriented careers as other Ivy league schools, etc. which are some of the highest paying careers right out of college. That being said, its other metrics are often better than Rice’s in terms of research funding, class size, alumni donations, student:faculty ratio, etc. Schools are far from equal in terms of what careers their students enter, and, as a result, the rate at which students start making income and the debt they acquire (from both undergrad and grad schools) will largely impact ROI calculations. This is why US News forgoes this metric. If making the most money as fast as possible is important to you then that has much more to do with career choice than school selection. School selection matters of course, but has far less bearing on this outcome than the career you ultimately enter.
Actually according to start-class, which by the way also rated Rice higher then Hopkins, Hopkins grads “earn a slightly higher salary then Rice 55,200 to 55,000”.
http://colleges.startclass.com/compare/1832-4210/Johns-Hopkins-University-vs-Rice-University
Also note that Rice has a lower admission rate and higher combined SAT/ACT scores.