JOwl
sum guy
Posts: 2,694
Joined: Jun 2005
I Root For: Rice
Location: Hell's Kitchen
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RE: Rice U Dropped from Top 10
(02-07-2014 10:10 PM)ExcitedOwl18 Wrote: (02-07-2014 07:52 PM)Ranger Wrote: (02-07-2014 04:58 PM)Barrett Wrote: I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see Rice fall outside of the top-20 in USNWR rankings within the next 5 years. This is pure, wild speculation on my part, so I have nothing to base this hunch on. Other schools are being more aggressive and using their branding more intelligently than Rice is.
Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton--these are schools at the top of the heap--and their brands seem more valuable today than ten years ago. I don't think the Rice name is somehow more valuable now than it was in 2004. Rice is currently tied with Notre Dame and BEHIND Vanderbilt. We may think that that doesn't sound right, but I think the rest of the world thinks it does.
Many years ago, Rice was unquestionably the best in the south and an alternative to the Ivy Leagues and MIT. These days it seems well behind them. Although the slide is not anywhere near as bad as in athletics, I see some parallels. Part of the problem might be that we have similarly slid in our endowment, and that might put constraints on everything else. When I matriculated in 1968, we had the highest endowment per student and were something like 6th in overall endowment. When last I looked, several years ago, we had fallen to about 20th overall.
As someone who was recently completed their college search and was admitted to Rice, I feel like I can contribute to this subject from a slightly different perspective. I attend a very competitive private all-male high school around Boston. The two most common schools for students at my school to attend are BC and Holy Cross (Ranked #31 (university) in USNWR and #25 (LAC) respectively), but last year we had four students attend Harvard, one Princeton, one Yale, one Dartmouth, three Notre Dame, five UVA, and one Vandy in addition to having ~20 matriculate to NESCAC (Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Amherst, Williams, etc..) schools. Anyway, I just picked some random competitive schools to illustrate my forthcoming point. Over the past seven years, my school has only averaged 1.2 APPLICANTS per year to Rice. Assuming my school is relatively representative of the general trends of the Boston area (and perhaps the northeast more broadly?), Rice simply isn't attracting enough applicants from the Northeast, arguably the most "talent-rich" area of the country, to keep up with peer institutions.
When I visited Vandy and Georgia Tech, it felt as if a third of the student population was from the DC to Boston corridor. When I visited Rice, it was clear that the student body was far more regional, which actually appealed to me. At Vandy, it seemed as if the northeastern students there were try-hards trying to act "southern" but failing miserably. In some ways, I hope Rice stays the way it is as I have not even started my time there. At the same time, I understand how the slide in the rankings is frustrating to alumni. This is just possibly one contributing factor that I felt I could talk about a little bit and by no means am I saying that I am not excited to attend Rice!!!
Welcome to Rice! (You are coming, right?)
I think recruiting in the Northeast can be a particularly hard nut to crack for a Texas school. The story I always think of is from a friend of mine, a lovely Jewish girl from Long Island I met early our freshman year since we were both at Lovett. Anyway, Lovett had gone with "RodeO-week" for its freshman orientation ("O-week") theme, so the groups were named things like "Wranglers" and there was plenty of cowboy slang in the materials. She later told me that when she got the O-week stuff in the mail, she cried. It hit all her fears about spending the next 4 years in hicksville.
But of course, she had a great time at Rice. Fell in love with another friend of mine, a Shepherd School double-bassist / guitarist / font geek from Houston. They lived in Boston for a few years while he went to Berklee and she went to Harvard Divinity School, got married, moved to Atlanta, had kids, she got her doctorate in Religious Studies from Emory and he produces music and does guitar gigs. Fascinating people.
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