Rice University is housed in the Museum
District of Houston, Texas. The goal of Rice has been to combine
the intimate size and teaching emphasis of a liberal arts college with the
scholarship of a major research university. It has recently become most known
globally for its early groundbreaking research in nanotechnology, and
its faculty are at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field. Much of the initial development of artificial hearts has also been conducted with the help of Rice faculty.
Rice University established the world's first department of space science (now the Rice Space Institute) and
donated the land that established the Johnson Space Center
for NASA (which eventually led to "Houston" being the first word spoken by a human on the
Moon). Fullerenes were discovered at
Rice, leading to a Nobel Prize for two faculty members in 1996.The intellectual horsepower of Rice University is apparent among those who study there. Approximately one quarter of
undergraduates are National Merit Scholars, and
Rice often holds the highest percentage in its freshman class among all American universities. Rice has also recently ranked #1
for the percentage of its students receiving National Science Fellowships, though it is also known for its strength in the social sciences and humanities. All undergraduate students of Rice are members of the residential college system, and there are no fraternities or sororities.Rice University boasts an endowment of $3 billion, which at over $600,000 per student, ranks as one of the five highest
worldwide (with Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford). Being relatively
generous with these funds allows the university to charge no excessive fees relative to most other prestigious private
universities, and the cost of education (tuition, room, and board) at Rice University is generally kept more reasonable than its
competition. Rice has recently been ranked first among 1,600 private universities for "Best College Value" in
Kiplinger's Personal Finance and first for
"least amount of debt per graduate" by
U.S. News
and World Report.
