<p>TWO of the besr Universities in the south, perhaps the whole country. My S has been accepted to both and liked both when visited, how does one decide?</p>
<p>duke, it's clearly better</p>
<p>I went to Duke (a long time ago) and I live in Houston (my son applied to both Duke and Rice) so I am pretty familiar with both schools. They are two very different schools. Rice is much smaller, both in physical size and student population. It has a beautiful campus in a dynamic part of town, and Houston definitely has more to offer than Durham. Rice is held in very high regard here and is quite competitive to get into. (I have heard that the admit rate for white males in this Texas area runs around 19% compared to 47% if you are from Idaho, because they are big into cultural and geographical diversity). I do think many people outside of this area aren't as familiar with Rice and therefore its reputation isn't as widely appreciated elsewhere in the country. The other big difference with Rice is that they have a residential college system of housing. The students live together throughout their college lives, and the residential college becomes their "fraternity" and identity of sorts. There are no Greek frats/sororities there. Many rave about the system and think it is one of the strong points about the school. Compared with Duke, I think the student body appeared to be more sedate, and I always wondered where everybody was. Campus was quiet, almost too quiet for us, and we were afraid it might not have that typical college hustle, bustle activity. </p>
<p>That said, Duke is an exceptional school and I loved my college experience there. Although it has changed since, it has grown its reputation as one of the finest. It has a beautiful campus, fine academics, outstanding student body. In my mind, it has it all. </p>
<p>Selecting a college is a personal decision, and there may be many factors that determine a good fit. If your son particularly wants a more intimate atmosphere and student body, perhaps Rice. However, if he wants a typical college experience, I would vote Duke. </p>
<p>Both are fine schools, but if I were choosing today, I would say Duke, hands down, for the overall better school.</p>
<p>My S visited both Duke and Rice, but ultimately applied to Duke but not Rice. Duke is better known nationally, although Rice is a truly excellent school. I assume your son has received a likely letter to Duke as the official RD decisions come out around March 30th. Perhaps he knows he's in secondary to receiving a scholarship. My impression from visiting both is that Duke is more diverse and energetic. While Duke is not a large school, it is more than twice the size of Rice. Duke also has a medical and law school as opposed to Rice. Sports save for baseball is a bigger deal at Duke.</p>
<p>I feel like the kids at Rice are friendlier-just my impression. The weather in Houston is not as variable as in Durham which I consider a negative.</p>
<p>Houston and the Rice Village area are far superior to Durham or even nearby Chapel Hill, as far as places to eat, shop, etc..</p>
<p>Rice is significantly less expensive than Duke also.</p>
<p>It boils down to personal choice. Both are fine schools. He will do well at either place. My son preferred Duke. I would have preferred Rice if it were my choice for the reasons that there is so much more to do off campus, and I do feel the kids are nicer--just my opinion. There are plenty of nice Dookies too.</p>
<p>If he can, I would encourage spending some time at both schools this April--best of luck!!!</p>
<p>Lots of good advice already. It has taken us getting 3 children through the admissions process, (our last one is a HS Senior now and hopefully will have both Duke and Rice to evaluate), to realize how different schools are. If you think you can't tell two schools apart - Keep doing your homework! Both Duke and Rice are excellent shools, but in my mind they could not be further apart in the type of experience. The biggest favor you can do for your son is to visit (when students are there) and dig deep. I am amazed at how many folks you will see on the campus tour who have done no homework to prepare for the visit and miss the opportunity to really identify the fit for the student.</p>
<p>Rice doesn't have a med school, but it's got the University of Houston and Baylor College of Medicine both nearby, so pre-meds will not lack for clinical exposure.</p>
<p>Four members of my immediate family are Duke grads. My youngest son opted for Rice. Although Duke is outstanding, Rice has a few advantages, starting with a residential college system that fosters greater diversity and virtually eliminates social exclusion. The vast majority of Duke faculty who teach undergraduates are outstanding, but we have been disappointed with the use and quality of TA's and the mission of a few professors to indoctrinate rather than teach. The professors a Rice have been uniformly excellent.</p>
<p>To our surprise, in the sciences the opportunities for research have been broader and more accessible to undergraduates at Rice. Although Duke has a renowned hospital that offers unique opportunities to a few undergrads, Rice is a member of the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, and also has close ties with the Johnson Space Center. Undergraduate research opportunities are there for the asking.</p>
<p>As for the the campuses, Rice is beautiful, but Duke has no peer. In addition to a Robert Trent Jones golf course, no other college has an 8000 acre forest; and there is nothing like the smell of loblollies after a rain. Off campus is another story. Durham has Bullock's and the Cosmic Cantina, which for my money (and it was my money) are two of the finest eateries anywhere. Back in the day, Chapel Hill was a nice place to visit, but it has become ten miles of traffic and upscale blight, unless you think that the Macaroni Grill is Italian dining. </p>
<p>Rice is surrounded by the Texas Medical Center, a huge metro park with a public golf course and a zoo, and seven galleries and museums. At Duke, when you need to find a little sanity, you can wonder into the forest and stop by the primate center. At Rice, you can peddle your bike through the park to the Houston Zoo, which offers a broader variety of intelligent life.</p>
<p>These are two outstanding but very different environments that appeal to similar students. Anyone who is fortunate enough to have a choice should visit both and preferably should spend a couple of days living with students. Both schools offer such opportunities. Some things instinctively appeal to individuals. Although my son was presumed to be the 5th to attend Duke, when he was crossing the campus at Rice he met an engineering professor who greeted him by his first name. He wasn't wearing a name tag. Deal closed.</p>
<p>In addition to BCM, another med school in the Texas Medical Center is the University of Texas Health Sciences Center.</p>
<p>UT
<a href="http://www.uthouston.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://www.uthouston.edu/</a></p>
<p>Baylor
<a href="http://www.bcm.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://www.bcm.edu/</a></p>
<p>Also, there are three law schools in Houston and one of the best in the country at UT-Austin. Rice grads are highly prized at all.</p>
<p>Personally, I live in Houston and absolutely love Chapel Hill and North Carolina. (Durham...eh.....but the Duke campus IS beautiful.) It's hard to compare quality of life in both places because what you get is so different. But the Rice area, with the museums, galleries, TMC, Rice Village, West U, proximity to downtown and uptown Galleria areas can't be beat imho.</p>
<p>i think that the evaluation for the Duke-Rice decision comes down to what type of person you are. Both are obviously great schools but as said in this thread, Rice students tend to be more welcoming, friendlier, less exclusive, I think due in large part to the residential college system. Unlike Duke, there is a lot of interaction between classes (i.e. freshmen, soph, junior, seniors) at Rice. At Duke, there is a separate Freshman campus and you have to take a bus to get to any other side of campus which I think is a downside and keeps you too narrowminded and not really informed on what its like to be a student esp at first. I know that I like to talk to older students for advice and at Rice many dorms have freshmen and seniors rigt across from each other, and the seniors are very helpful. Both universities are very "campusy" meaning most of the stuff goes on on campus rather than in the surroudnding cities. But I hear durham is not much fun at all, whereas there seems to be some stuff to do in Houston and in the Rice Village, etc if you want. Rice seems to have equally driven, but more laid back students as compared to Duke. I would go Rice hands down but thats me.</p>
<p>One thing I forgot to mention about Rice that we didn't like was that there isn't housing guaranteed for all 4 years (not enough room). What they explained to us was that either soph or junior year, students have to live off campus for a year, then they come back to campus after that. Of course this could have changed in the past year, but that's how it was a couple of years ago.
By the way, when I was at Duke, I lived on West campus in the best dorm on campus with respect to convenience of location. Regardless of whether you live on East or West, you will probably have classes on both, and will end up going back and forth anyway. Going back and forth isn't a big deal, and bus service is almost continuous with a short wait.
The move to put all freshman on East together was actually a strategic one so that there would be more camaraderie within the class and you would get to know the other freshman better. It has been highly successful from what I have heard, and other schools (Vanderbilt for one) are changing over to that concept, so I definitely wouldn't view that as a negative.</p>
<p>Although Durham isn't great, it has greatly improved since I was there, and UNC is just a short drive away if you want a real lively college scene. I would pick the school mainly for the academics and the size. I wouldn't generalize and say that Duke students are less friendly. We didn't even really see many students when we visited Rice . Not having anyone to talk to was more bothersome to us than not having anyone talk to us. Like others have said, try to visit. Both are good schools.
Let us know what you decide! Good luck.</p>
<p>I have to disagree with bandmom - going back and forth between East and West is a big deal. Many mornings the buses are full and don't stop - and it's not just one bus - it's two or three in a row. My daughter has ended up having to run from East to West to make it to class on time. And on the Fridays before a break it is worse. I visited Durham to see my daughter over the short October break - after waiting for a bus for 40 minutes on West Campus she finally called me to ask if I could pick her up so she could return to East Campus to pack for our weekend trip.</p>
<p>The freshman class may know each other better - but none of them know anything about how things work unless they have an older sibling on campus. It's important for freshmen not to be isolated which they are under the East Campus scenario. My daughter has all of her classes on West Campus and spends all day there at class and meetings - which means she is unable to return to East Campus to eat at the Marketplace for lunch and many times dinner which means extra food costs for her budget.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt does not have a separate campus for its freshman class and it has one main facility in the middle of campus where everyone eats. And the dorm rooms are primarily singles - small, but only one person to a room. Floors are also segregated by sex and there are women only dorms. Freshmen are on the main campus - about a 5 to 10 minute walk from most major facilities except the Blair School of Music which is on the far side of the medical facilities. </p>
<p>And if you have been to 9th Street lately you'd realize that there is not much close to East Campus. In October I went to each and every store on 9th Street. The drug store has closed and is now an empty storefront and it's not the only empty storefront - about 1/4 of the stores were vacant. Rice does have some shopping villages around the perimeter. Plus Rice also has a shuttle each weekend that goes to Super Target and other shops. Duke has no regular shuttle service to shopping areas like Rice provides.</p>
<p>Housing at Duke is changing. In Spring 2007 many juniors returning from Study Aboard were unable to obtain housing on campus and were not notified until just weeks before the term began leaving them little time to find a place to live. Juniors return from Study Abroad every year so Student Housing should already have beem aware of this need. My daughter also tells me she has not met a single senior who lives on campus. So, although Duke may say it guarantees housing for all four years, in practice they do not. </p>
<p>Faculty in residence was supposed to start on the West Campus in the Fall of 2007, but once it was realized how many beds would be lost, the program has been scaled down to one faculty in residence this fall. This program is patterned after the faculty in residence on East Campus.</p>
<p>i dont think there is even a competition between two.
and i love durham. it's awesome city if you really experience it. (a lot of stuffs being said here and there are stereotypes.)</p>
<p>unless you want to do something Rice is exceptionally good at (dont they have one of the best music program?), Duke would be a great place to pursue whatever interests you have.</p>
<p>(I sound like a huge Duke fan, but I shall remind you that I havent been to one single basketball game.)</p>
<p>Westcoastmom:
Thanks for setting the record straight about how Duke is for the current students. Things must have really changed since I was there and even since we visited a couple of years ago as the guides told us then that bus service isn't typically a problem. I am glad you have a more current perspective and could share it with the board.</p>
<p>About Vanderbilt, however, I would like to clarify a few things you commented on. My son is currently a student there so I feel reasonably confident my info is accurate. Freshman housing is currently split between singles and doubles. Those who are in singles primarily live in all-freshman dorms, and many of those are at the far end of campus. What I was referring to, however, is that Vanderbilt is completely redoing its housing arrangements for freshman, and they are moving to an arrangement similar to Duke's. Freshman will be exclusively housed on Peabody Campus (far end--oppposite end from current freshman housing). They will have the dorms, some dining, etc. on that campus and I believe this is supposed to start with the incoming class of 2009. Of course, this could be delayed, but we have been told that is the plan. The idea is to have a cohesive freshman class. They may be planning faculty in residence as well--not sure about the status of that.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand. There are lots of issues to consider when selecting a school--Duke over Rice or any school for that matter. One will get a variety of views depending upon the priorities of those you ask. Best thing is to visit and take a close look and decide for yourself.
Hope all of our various viewpoints have helped rather than confused the decision process.</p>
<p>I did notice that the buses took a sharp turn for the worse suddenly when I got back to school in January 2005. I don't know what caused this to happen. until then, they were just fine on weekdays. Weekends have always been annoying.</p>
<p>Even my senior year (Spring 2006), however, the bus situation was not nearly as bad as WCM mentions.</p>
<p>1.) The buses most certainly stop at East and West Campus. There are other stops along the way where they might miss you, but they certainly stop and unload at the East and West. </p>
<p>2.) There are so few Fridays before breaks that this is an extremely small point -- Fall and Spring Breaks, maybe? -- but I can't imagine why they would be any worse those days. I certainly never noticed it.</p>
<p>3.)
[quote]
none of them know anything about how things work
[/quote]
I suspect this is probably true of freshmen in general.</p>
<p>4.) I always liked Ninth Street unless things have changed dramatically in ten months (which they might have). You have bookstores, coffee stores, a pizza place, etc. There's a Mad Hatter's, a Mexican restaurant, etc. It's not a "nice" neighborhood per se in, say, the manner of the Stanford Mall, but it's not lacking in the cute little things to do.</p>
<p>5.) The juniors-going-abroad thing has been changing because more and more students are specifically studying abroad during the fall semester of their junior year, meaning that housing on campus is more and more in demand during Springs. In other words, it's not as if this is a longstanding problem. My understanding of this situation is extremely different from WCM's -- in fact, it's almost exactly the opposite.</p>
<p>Juniors are required to live on-campus unless space fills up. If space fills up -- and it does -- then there is a lottery by which juniors who want to are selected to be permitted to move off-campus. In other words, moving off campus is a result of **winning **the lottery, not of losing it.</p>
<p>Two years ago -- my junior year -- the juniors (i.e. my classmates) almost all "won" the lottery because of the way the odds played out. So last year (my senior year), the juniors all assumed that they would similarly win the lottery and many of them, treating the lottery as a formality, went ahead and signed leases for off-campus housing.</p>
<p>Lo and behold, for whatever reason the odds had shifted, and some of them turned out to lose and be required to live on-campus. Many of them were upset, but in reality this wasn't the administration's fault.</p>
<p>In other words, not only is the administration not at fault, but the problem is almost exactly the opposite of what WCM describes: they wanted to move off and weren't permitted to because we DID have space. It's not that they wanted to stay on and weren't permitted to.</p>
<p>6.) Seniors move off-campus by choice, not by obligation. I had no problems obtaining a plum single room in a three-year-old dorm for my senior year despite a relatively poor lottery number. (Of course, monitoring and planning for the selection process with my Rhodes-Scholar next door neighbor didn't hurt anything, either.)</p>
<p>I'm at Rice and I chose it over Duke last year. I know a bunch of people here who also chose Rice over Duke (both enginerring and liberal arts majors). We're happy here, but it's hard to compare your college experience to another university you've never attended. If you go to Rice you will not know what the Duke experience is. If you go to Duke you will not know what the Rice experience is. Funny thing is, if you are a high school senior you can hardly know what the experience at either university will be like.</p>
<p>Yes, choosing a college does seem like a big deal. You will be there for the next four years of your life. Or possibly three, or possibly five or six. Or maybe you'll transfer, or study abroad a year. Who knows? My point is, it's impossible to know what the future has in store for you. Often in life you have to put yourself out there, take risks, make big decisions that you are not completely certain about. Take choosing a career, or moving to a new region, or getting married, for instance, which may be a bit more important than which college you went to.</p>
<p>I know a lot of highly intelligent people here like to closely analyze and pick apart a major situation like this - weigh all the pros and cons, attack it from every angle, add up every last detail, and consider all rankings, ratings, and intangibles. All this with the showering advice and two cents from numerous friends and family. But colleges cannot really be judged or compared quantitatively --- at the top levels it can really be a matter of preference -- choosing strawberry or chocolate ice cream --- although of course a much bigger decision. Yet are you going to seek other people's opinions or analyze direct head-to-head competition tournaments to pick what flavor ice cream you want?</p>
<p>Rice and Duke do have different student bodies and atmospheres -- but it's impossible to really know what these are and how you'll respond to them unless you've lived the life of an undergrad there for a month (don't start getting any ideas now). And yet, in my opinion, a school's student body is the single most important thing about a university. </p>
<p>Yes, I know, the strength of a schools departments and its various academic opportunities and its renowned faculty are oh so important. But consider that you only spend an average of 2.5 hours in class a day (less if you're on a quarter system). Thats an average of 12.5 a week. You will be spending the vast majority of your time outside of class. Not to mention, the quality of each class itself is almost completely determined by the professor, who has a great deal of autonomy in what he/she wants you to do. </p>
<p>Not to mention, most professors here at Rice have been profs at many other universities. I'm a freshman yet I've taken classes from professors who came from Stanford, Cornell, UMich, and Princeton -- and those are only the ones that bothered to go into their life story. So how do the profs at Rice compare to the profs at school X? I don't know, last year students at Cornell were taking this guy's class, this year I'm taking it. He's the same guy teaching the same class! But even if the professor is particularly funny, witty, challenging, harsh, open, reserved, conservative, liberal, sexist, or insane --- you're basically learning the same concepts from the same textbooks. Intro to Econ, game theory, the laws of physics -- these do not change university to university. And no matter what school you go to ---- you WILL be happy when class is cancelled.</p>
<p>Most of your college life will revolve around the people you meet and interact with from day to day and the goofy adventures you have (outside the classroom). You will not know who will be there--- the freshman class, your roommate, they have not even arrived yet. Your dorm, the insanity of your roommate, how hot your neighbors are -- two guys at Rice or Duke may have completely different experiences at the same place. You cannot be totally certain or prepared, and to a degree you can shape your own college experience.</p>
<p>All I know is that a friend of mine I met here and myself both had one long, agonizing month before making our decisions between Rice and Duke. I hope you have fun agonizing over your decision as well. Although I will tell you that Duke has greater name recognition than Rice up North, and laypersons who don't know much about Rice may be surprised when you tell them you chose it over Duke. Which doesn't mean much, but just letting you know the truth here.</p>
<p>*Btw, there's something in psychology where when someone makes a major decision in their life, such as choosing a college, after they choose it, his/her opinion of the college significantly increases as to rationalize /reduce dissonance or what have you. So Duke students and alumni are obviously going to have a higher opinion of Duke than the average person and ditto for Rice students and alumni and Rice.</p>
<p>Anyway, have you considered you'll be happy at either school?</p>
<p>Lol, thanks for reading this long-winded response, I rather got carried away.</p>
<p>Peter:
What a thoughtful and insightful post! Thanks for sharing your experiences. I know this thread appears on the Rice board as well, so I encourage you to copy your post onto the Rice message board if you haven't already done so.</p>
<p>I'm pleased to be able to say that our son has not experienced the problems that WestCoastMom's daughter has encountered (and I'm sorry that she is disappointed). </p>
<p>Our son is a Duke freshman in engineering, and most of his classes are on west campus. First semester, his schedule did make it difficult to eat lunch on east campus, but that's when he used the food points that come with the freshman dining plan. </p>
<p>Housing the freshmen together has worked very well for him. He and his hall mates (male and female) are very tight. He says that he gets loads of e-mails from the university in advance of whatever deadline or activity is coming up.</p>
<p>I can't evaluate the Rice part of the equation, but I do want to weigh in with my son's experience so far this year. He still says that Duke is "amazing," and that the students are "amazing," and he feels incredibly fortunate to be there.</p>
<p>~Mafool</p>