Even as a Rice alum who obviously has biases toward his alma mater, I think it's pretty clear that MIT is generally a more elite institution than Rice. Using the US News rankings as a guide (and let's leave out the consternation about the flaws of the rankings for a moment), MIT consistently is ranked in the top 5-7 universities in the country, one of the top universities in the world, and its individual disciplines in engineering, business, and the sciences are usually ranked in the top-10 . . . often times number 1.
Rice simply can't claim that. Rice is ranked #18 (tied with Notre Dame, behind Vanderbilt), and its individual departments in the sciences and engineering are generally ranked in the 20s and 30s.
Even in disciplines like history and political science, Rice is ranked 30 and 32, respectively. MIT's numbers are 27 and 8, respectively. Yes, Rice has certain disciplines ranked where MIT doesn't, but MIT can say the converse many times over.
Even in the "best value" ranking, MIT beats Rice--5 vs. 14.
Here is the tale of the tape:
MIT's rankings
Rice's rankings
I know we can say, "Well Rice is better than MIT or Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Cal Tech because our undergraduate teaching is better." Maybe that's true, but I don't know how to measure that. We say it because we assume it without any hard evidence. We assume that those other schools rely on more graduate student TAs than Rice does. Maybe that's true, but I've never seen the numbers. And even if we just assume that as fact, how do we know that a brilliant TA, earning his PhD at MIT or Harvard, is inherently inferior to an older professor at Rice? My guess is that, by in large, the teaching at those other schools is pretty damn good, given the quality of minds they are churning out each year. Perhaps those minds came into those other schools already brilliant, but surely that has got to count toward the educational environment for students as well?
I love Rice as much as the next alumnus. But for what it's worth (perhaps not much), if a high school kid tells me he just got into MIT, I'm more impressed than if he tells me he got into Rice. Same with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Cal Tech. And what that CBS show reflects is that the rest of the world views it the same way I do (assuming they've even heard of Rice at all).
I think if Rice had MIT's or Stanford's or Harvard's rankings numbers, their impossibly low acceptance rates, their endowments, or their prominent and accomplished alumni, this Board would be shouting it from the rooftops. In short, I think it's okay to acknowledge the superiority/desirability of other schools, so long as they're the right schools. And it doesn't make me love Rice or my time there any less.