<p>You can really be as well-rounded or well-lopsided as you like at Rice.</p>
<p>If someone disagrees with me on this, feel free to chime in, but introductory courses are, in the end, introductory courses, and I seriously doubt there’s going to be any real difference between them at Rice and Chicago. </p>
<p>For instance, Chicago has a better mathematics department than Rice, but if all you’re going to do is take a few calculus courses, differential equations and linear algebra, this will be totally irrelevant–you’ll never get close to approaching the areas that actually make Chicago better for math than Rice. This is going to be true for most departments.</p>
<p>Now, the quality of introductory courses does vary from school to school–that is very true. But once you restrict your focus to schools in the top 20, my belief is that this variation ceases to exist for the most part.</p>
<p>Just to be clear, I have nothing against Chicago. It’s a fantastic school! I just don’t want to see you (or your parents) throw out $80,000 just because you think that you might get a slightly more well-rounded education at Chicago, especially when this claim is tenuous at best.</p>