(09-10-2018 11:31 AM)RiceFootball2K5 Wrote:  I've got to think part of that is the skyrocketing costs. Rice used to be affordable. I know we try to make up for it with financial aid, but the sticker cost has gotten pretty outrageous.

Honestly, I think you may be overstating this. When we were looking at Rice for my daughter, I visited the financial aid office, and they said that once you calculated the parent contribution, there really wasn't anything that would reduce that. If she got scholarships, that may reduce the student contribution, but I had the impression that any scholarships that were awarded to were went straight to Rice's coffers without benefiting our family (her loan amounts or our contributions).

On this note...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...ca/569884/

"This competition (for public universities with dwindling state govt. contributions to enroll more high-paying foreign and out-of-state students) eventually crept beyond climbing walls and dining halls into major, long-term operating expenses. For example, U.S. colleges spend, relative to other countries, a startling amount of money on their nonteaching staff, according to the OECD data. Some of these people are librarians or career or mental-health counselors who directly benefit students, but many others do tangential jobs that may have more to do with attracting students than with learning. Many U.S. colleges employ armies of fund-raisers, athletic staff, lawyers, admissions and financial-aid officers, diversity-and-inclusion managers, building-operations and maintenance staff, security personnel, transportation workers, and food-service workers."

"In fact, no other country rewards a college degree as richly as the United States, and few other countries punish people so relentlessly for not having one. It’s a diabolical cycle: Colleges are very expensive to run, partly because of the high salaries earned by their skilled workers. But those higher salaries make college degrees extremely valuable, which means Americans will pay a lot to get them. And so colleges can charge more. As Carey, the End of College author, summarizes: “Students are over a barrel.”

Still, the return varies wildly depending on the college one attends. One in four college grads earns no more than the average high-school graduate."

(09-10-2018 10:16 AM)waltgreenberg Wrote:  

(09-10-2018 09:52 AM)Hou_Lawyer Wrote:  Disappointing to say the least. How do we break into that next tier with NW and Cal Tech? More alumni donations (as a %)? Med school? Be more selective with admissions?

1. Yes, our alumni giving participation rate continues to lag other schools, and this is dragging is down at least 2 - 3 ranking spots.
2. Yes, a med school or law school would improve our rankings, but it just is not going to happen. It's not who we are. Accept it.
3. Are recent admissions has been more selective than it has ever been in the school's history.
The reality is that the criteria used in the USN&WR rankings puts Rice at a disadvantage vs. others schools. Fortunately, we stack up incredibly well in the various Princeton rankings, and that has become the bible used by high school students and parents in evaluating schools.

The paradox is that Rice's focus on undergrad education causes many rating systems to downgrade the value of that undergraduate education. If Rice wanted to climb, in all ratings really, the biggest single impact would come from the research stream that accompanies any medical school.

If Rice is happy doing its undergrad thing and getting mid-teens rankings in USN&WR, higher in Princeton, and lower (among US universities) in worldwide rankings (which tend to weight research more heavily), then the present course is a good one. If Rice has higher aspirations, then something is going to have to change.

(09-12-2018 10:56 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(09-10-2018 10:16 AM)waltgreenberg Wrote:  

(09-10-2018 09:52 AM)Hou_Lawyer Wrote:  Disappointing to say the least. How do we break into that next tier with NW and Cal Tech? More alumni donations (as a %)? Med school? Be more selective with admissions?

1. Yes, our alumni giving participation rate continues to lag other schools, and this is dragging is down at least 2 - 3 ranking spots.
2. Yes, a med school or law school would improve our rankings, but it just is not going to happen. It's not who we are. Accept it.
3. Are recent admissions has been more selective than it has ever been in the school's history.
The reality is that the criteria used in the USN&WR rankings puts Rice at a disadvantage vs. others schools. Fortunately, we stack up incredibly well in the various Princeton rankings, and that has become the bible used by high school students and parents in evaluating schools.

The paradox is that Rice's focus on undergrad education causes many rating systems to downgrade the value of that undergraduate education. If Rice wanted to climb, in all ratings really, the biggest single impact would come from the research stream that accompanies any medical school.

If Rice is happy doing its undergrad thing and getting mid-teens rankings in USN&WR, higher in Princeton, and lower (among US universities) in worldwide rankings (which tend to weight research more heavily), then the present course is a good one. If Rice has higher aspirations, then something is going to have to change.

Rice did rank #8 in the latest USN&WR rankings for focus on undergraduate education.

Here's how Rice ranks national in each of the academic discplines-- pretty impressive...

https://www.niche.com/colleges/rice-univ.../rankings/