(09-09-2020 04:15 PM)MWCRobert Wrote:  Rice isn't that TINY of an enrollment. I don't understand why the school doesn't try to improve their athletics and fan interest. And would expanding undergrad enrollment by say 3,000 additional students hurt the school that much? Duke, TCU and Notre Dame have more undergrads, and they seem to be doing alright.

IBID to Tomball's comments.

It's important to note that we've already expanded our enrollment pretty substantially, especially in our graduate programs which don't often really help athletics. Taking us to 7,000 undergraduate really probably isn't feasible in our footprint. We'd literally have to double our dorm and classroom space.

Undergraduate enrollment
1930 1300
1950 1400
1970 2400
1990 2700
2010 3500
2020 4000

Graduate enrollment
1930 65
1950 127
1970 700
1990 1300
2010 2300
2020 3200

I think the problem is that the focus of the University has been on graduate programs and rankings... and athletics don't have much to do with that. Rice USED to focus on keeping strong southern, especially Texas students in the south... which means a lot of our students grew up with Texas sports.