Today, if we have two choices,

a) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school (in academy) nationally.
b) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school in football.

I will choose a, although a or b doesn't matter that much for me.

I bet lots of you will select b, would like to know why b? share you thought please!

my gut reaction was to say A, but as ridiculous and farcical as football rankings are, academic rankings are even less based in reality. so I say B but truly I don't care. Getting 4 people on that list of people who are under 30 and changing the world is better than either of these things.

To clarify, if I choose B, we remain ranked 16 or 17 as we are now?

A. No brainer.

A.

yes, we remain 17(academically) if u choose B

(01-21-2014 12:50 PM)Antarius Wrote:  To clarify, if I choose B, we remain ranked 16 or 17 as we are now?

I would say B, because the exposure to B would likely help up achieve A as well. That way we would be BOTH A and B.

I don't see much of a difference between rank 7 and 17. Definitely didn't factor into my application decisions.

Rather than get getting a national championship in football, I would like Rice have another Smalley.

100 years later, nobody care about who is 2014 football championship, but Smalley will be still there.

I wanna rice football win as eager as anyone else. However, if I have 100M donate to Rice, probably will designate it for a scholarship for top student, rather than finish finishing the endzone projct.

The question isn't as clear as you state for a few reasons.

Being #17 vs #10 academically takes literally billions of dollars (see BCM attempt). Being #10 academically also lasts for quite some time as a result of the high barrier of entry.

Being #10 in football can be done for much less, but is also much more transitive.

I think we can do more with say $10mm/year for a long time to make football a top 25 program (with occasional peaks at the top 10) which COULD move Rice academically from #17 to perhaps #15 (WAG) because of the number of components to those rankings for things like alumni satisfaction, public recognition, student activities, campus life etc etc etc than we could by spending that same $10mm per year on academics.

What I'm saying is, spreading $10mm across all of our academic programs isn't going to change them much... and concentrating them in any one academic program isn't likely to improve our rankings because I'm not aware that we are outliers in any particular discipline (on any large scale) and it wouldn't be enough to start a new graduate program...

but spending that money on athletics in general, which would include the track/soccer complex and the wellness center and intramurals and club sports and the like WOULD make a huge difference in our athletic profile, and positively impact literally every person who is or has been on campus.

So I say B, but only because IMO, it is much more realistic than A. A would be the priority and I wouldn't want B to happen if it meant falling from #17... I just think the reality is that B would be more likely to help us get to 16 than to push us to 18. More likely, what will push us to 18 is Vandy's recent success, if they can maintain it.

FTR, we have about $4byn dedicated to academics at Rice. We have about $400mm dedicated to athletics at Rice (not athletic endowment, but the portion of the endowment necessary to fund athletics at our current level).

As to your preference to put $100mm, I understand the point, but you may be looking at it too myopically.

Clearly your $100mm would be much more meaningful to athletics than academics... and if you put it towards athletic rather than academic scholarships (note that athletic scholarships ARE academic scholarships, but for athletes) then the amount of money needed to fund athletics from the endowment goes down, not up. Your $100mm goes to academic scholarships just as you want.

Funding the EZF isn't like funding scholarships. It is more like funding the wellness center or the student life center.

The beauty of Rice is that many of our distinguished alumni chose Rice specifically because in the 50's and 60's, they didn't have to choose between top notch athletics and top notch academics. Duke, Vandy, Stanford and Northwestern still somewhat offer that situation.

(01-21-2014 12:33 PM)junrice Wrote:  Today, if we have two choices,
a) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school (in academy) nationally.
b) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school in football.
I will choose a, although a or b doesn't matter that much for me.
I bet lots of you will select b, would like to know why b? share you thought please!

To expand a bit on Hambone's comments, the problem with the question is that it is dependent upon an invalid premise. We don't have that choice, and we're not going to have that choice, because that choice doesn't exist. In reality, there is very little that could or would be done to achieve A that would have any impact, negative or positive, on the ability to achieve B, and vice versa.

I think there's a fair case that achieving either would contribute significantly and positively toward achieving the other.

Given the choice I would take A, but I don't think it's a legitimate choice.

For what it's worth, in the current US News rankings, Rice is #18.

Vanderbilt is ranked better at #17.

Rice is currently tied with Notre Dame. So I guess Notre Dame is the school everyone on this Board is aspiring to be. :)

In my opinion, Leebron recognized the gradual slippage of Rice and the BCM purchase was meant to be a dramatic course correction. As discussed here on this Board many times, a Rice/BCM combination would probably have resulted in Rice being a top-10 (or very close to it) university. Shortsightedness, risk aversion (fear), and perhaps academic turfiness thwarted that effort.

If you ask almost any school in the country (outside the top-15 universities) whether they would be willing to pay $1 billion to leapfrog themselves into a top-10 ranking, I think the answer would be a resounding yes. You don't see it happen because such an opportunity never presents itself. It presented itself to Rice, however, and Rice turned it down.

(01-21-2014 12:33 PM)junrice Wrote:  Today, if we have two choices,

a) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school (in academy) nationally.
b) Immediately Rice is a top 10 school in football.

I will choose a, although a or b doesn't matter that much for me.

I bet lots of you will select b, would like to know why b? share you thought please!

B because that would help the entire athletic program, men and women, and lead our university to be more on par with Stanford , Duke and NW. The scales are tipped too far toward academia.

I see the question more as do I prefer Rice to be an Ivy League school or a football power. If I have to chose just one, I go with Ivy League academics. But as noted above, that is a false premise. I don't have to make that choice. I choose option C: The Stanford model - top 10 in BOTH! Note Duke does the same if you sub basketball for football. I would rather Rice be peers with Stanford and Duke than U. Chicago and Columbia. There's nothing wrong with the latter 2, but the Rice way is to excel at ALL we do. That means we have work to do on both sides of the equation. As a practical matter, getting into the top 10 in football does, as Hambone pointed out, help on the academic side's climb into the top 10 too. I don't think being in the top 10 academically helps nearly as much on the football side of the ledger. So given my desire to be top 10 in both, I choose to pursue the football top 10 first.

I would take B. Rice is already a very good academic school with a very good academic reputation. If rice was only ranked #30-50 academically, I would probably vote A. But the football improvement in B is orders-of-magnitude better than he corresponding improvement in A. Also, as mentioned, at least some of the improvement in B would trickle over to A, but that isn't true with improvements to A.