<p>That’s quite the leap of logic. A few anecdotes are not nearly sufficient to substantiate this assertion that Rice is intentionally rejecting applicants whom it suspects may attend a different top school instead of Rice.</p>
<p>Further, did you read your friends’ essays? Essays are significant, and I doubt that your friends used the same essays for both schools. Have you considered the possibility that they wrote poor essays for Rice? Rice has a notoriously difficult essay prompt–it seems completely plausible to me that their essays for Rice may not have been as good as their essays for other schools.</p>
<p>Your posts here very strongly suggest that you don’t even really want to attend Rice and foolishly considered it a safety. If this attitude came off in your application, it is absolutely not surprising you were waitlisted. Perhaps your friends also didn’t show much interest and suffered from this delusion that Rice could somehow be a safety school for them. There should be no shock at all that Rice would reject or waitlist applicants who demonstrate little interest in Rice and who seem grossly misinformed about what selectivity in admissions means. Rice is seeking to build a passionate community, and that won’t work if it’s filled with people who have such attitudes.</p>
<p>Besides what I’ve written here, there are numerous other factors that you seem to be just ignoring that others have mentioned. Rice and other top schools have the luxury of more or less hand-picking their freshmen classes. This means they very often look beyond the plain-old factors of GPA, test scores, etc., and they try to build an overall cohesive community. This should make it obvious that an applicant may be accepted at one top school but not another.</p>