<p>I know it would be an uphill battle, but it has great potential to do so. And it can afford to so it as it has several billions of endowment fund.</p>
<p>I don’t want it to do so.</p>
<p>Virgin sacrifices. Become part of the Mafia.</p>
<p>Rice is cool enough. It doesn’t need HYPSM status to impress people.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’d ever be up there because it just isn’t as famous as HYPSM…</p>
<p>if it somehow built a ton more grad schools and they all somehow became top 5 then maybe it’d be up there…</p>
<p>remember a lot of the college ranking is based on the grad’s prestige</p>
<p>RML; I did some snooping (sorry :eek:) and it looks like a lot of your posts have to do with rankings and such. The rankings are really kind of silly. Rice is fine as is and doesn’t need to compete. :)</p>
<p>lol, I don’t think Rice cares to that extent…</p>
<ol>
<li>move out of texas</li>
<li>build a crapload of uber amazing grad schools</li>
<li>…</li>
<li>lol</li>
<li>epic win</li>
</ol>
<p>but seriously…does it matter that much? only hypsm will be hypsm any time soon so… there ya go</p>
<p>top bulge bracket firms, for example, don’t recruit Rice grads as much as they do other elite privates, let alone HYPSM. Heck, Rice can’t even beat Berkeley and Michigan in that area and these two are just public schools. As Rice students and alumni, don’t you want to be as marketable as you should have been given your school’s high quality of education, brilliant professors and superb students?</p>
<p>I used to think Rice was just another elite private college until I got to visit the campus and discovered tons of wealth and resources that it can actually be better than what people thought of it.</p>
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<p>But why not? After all, it is every school’s goal to become the best. Now that Rice has actually the tools to be ahead, why is it not capitalizing on that?</p>
<p>But Rice doesn’t want to be like them…they don’t want to have that elitist atmosphere, where everyone’s concerned about how much money you have, clothes you wear, social status, etc that the Ivies and other East Coast schools have. Not to say there isn’t elitism in cities in Texas either (there is), but Texas just doesn’t care about that Yankee crap as much as they do. Rice was free tuition for students for a very long time, it was WMR’s desire to attract the best and brightest regardless of their ability to pay…can Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. say they remained tuition free in 1965…don’t think so.</p>
<p>As for grad schools, like Amherst, Williams, etc., Rice is committed to UG education first and foremost. While a medical school would be beneficial for research, I think that Rice should only add one if they are committed to making it as highly ranked as the university itself (which Baylor Med is, unlike the burgeoning financial weight that is the merely good Jones School of Business). Amherst and Williams don’t want to be another HYPSM that is more focused on grad school than undergrad; same with Rice.</p>
<p>A way they can improve the university is boost our humanities and social sciences schools. They’re good, but they need to be “in the news” more when it comes to all things Rice. Engineering and scientific research always seem to come to mind when you hear about Rice, I’d like many more students to want to come to Rice not only for top programs in those disciplines, but also for the economics, political science, psychology, history, etc. (Not that those aren’t on par with other top schools, but it would be nice to have those get some of the limelight as well).</p>
<p>And as for BB firms, I guess Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citi, and JP Morgan aren’t bulge bracket then? But I get your point, while Rice does have grads that go to work to these places, if they could significantly improve their economics department they would move from a semi or regional target to a target, like HPSYM, other Ivies, Duke, etc. The thing that hurts Rice in that regard is that 1) It isn’t nationally known (most bankers start off working in Houston rather than Wall St., which IMO is a good thing, but that just because I have a bad opinion of NYC versus Houston) 2) It’s economics department is good, but not on the top tier level…something which the administration sorely needs to address. 3) Not a lot of people necessarily come into Rice wanting to do banking or consulting, despite the fact that many students end up taking jobs there, as opposed to a Wharton or Duke, where you pretty much know that a lot of students are doing the business/economics to get a job on Wall Street.</p>
<p>RML, have you ever heard of a school called Washington University in St. Louis? What about Case Western Reserve University? I’m sure you have, since you seem to pay so much attention to rankings. Both of these schools have followed a model that tries to compete directly with Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc., and both have found their niches — as fallback schools for people who didn’t get in to the Ivies. When I visited Case, I encountered nobody who cited Case as his top-choice school. The entire campus seemed disengaged. My friend who transferred from WashU to Rice cited a similar sort of feeling. When you start to compete directly with HYPSM, you lose, plain and simple. What makes Rice so great is that the students here are fully engaged with the university —*an unusually large number of people picked Rice as their first choice, not because of prestige, but because of things like the residential colleges (which are better than Harvard’s and Yale’s) and the general feeling of excitement on this campus. When you start attracting students by prestige and prestige alone, your campus dies. End of story.</p>
<p>Rice is paradise for Owls.</p>
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<p>Seriously, if you want to work at a BB firm, and the only way you can do it is on campus recruiting, you’re doing it wrong. Rice offers a culture that is unparalleled among other undergraduate institutions. If you’re qualified, you can send your resume out, network…etc and get jobs that HYPSM grads get. Rankings really aren’t a big deal for undergrad, especially for the top 30.</p>
<p>IMHO Rice aggressively competes with HYPSM through its scholarship and Century Scholars program. It competes head to head with the students of choice. Several on these boards, including D, were accepted into HYPSM and decided to go to Rice. Also, of the Ivies, I would say Dartmouth is the most undergraduate focused and many people will poo poo Harvard as a place to go for an undergraduate education-- I have heard this for years by many wise people. The others fall in between. Rice v. Dartmouth is an interesting contrast and you will find stark differences in the environment of each and why some choose one over the other. I do feel that Rice is stronger in the sciences on balance with its other programs it offers.</p>
<p>RML–where did you get this information?</p>
<p>“Rice can’t even beat Berkeley and Michigan in that area and these two are just public schools.”</p>
<p>Whether competing in this way is important or not, the comparison doesn’t make any sense unless you’re comparing percentages of students rather than raw numbers. Berkeley has 25,000 undergraduates. Of course they’d have more students doing everything than Rice would.</p>
<p>By the way, RML, are these questions simply out of curiosity or part of some research project?</p>
<p>^ Hi BerkeleyMom. This is simply out of curiosity. I thought Rice is very able to compete with the very best yet it seems that it’s not doing anything to push itself too hard to thrive and become one of the top 10, let alone top 5. </p>
<p>what’s wrong with Rice officials?</p>
<p>Myrmidon73 and the rest, this thread is not to bash Rice. This thread would be a venue to discuss why Rice is not top 15 let alone top 10. This could also be a venue to discuss what Rice should do to improve. Instead of whining, it would be better if we can start discussing about HOW Rice can improve more. As it stand, it isn’t a top 15. But it could have been even top 10 given its wealth of resources. So, what’s wrong? we can probably find that out if we will discuss instead of whining…</p>
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<p>I think almost all survey would point out that those two schools are more well-known than Rice on national level, let alone international level. </p>
<p>BTW, I’m not talking about quality of education here. I think Rice is a very high standard school. I’m talking about prestige, which is an area where Rice is actually deficient. </p>
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<p>Yes, Berkeley has 25k students, but they’re mostly in-state students. Yet, when you go to the NE or MW or even in many parts of the South, there are more people who have heard of Berkeley than of Rice. This is even prevalent when you go out of the US. For example, which school would you think a random guy in Canada would choose between Rice and Berkeley? I’m an international and have acquired my degree from England and Berkeley is very well respected there whilst Rice isn’t as no one has probably of Rice University in England other than myself. Let’s try not to be hypercritical and just accept it that Rice isn’t well-known yet. But the point is, it can be well-known. It can expand it prestige. But are Rice officials really doing something to improve Rice more?</p>
<p>Is this what you were looking for?</p>
<p>[A</a> Vision For The 2nd Century | Introduction](<a href=“http://www.professor.rice.edu/professor/Vision.asp]A”>http://www.professor.rice.edu/professor/Vision.asp)</p>