<p>After Brandeis, Rice may be the smallest university with robust coverage of Linguisitics, Classics, and CS. It’s a little less selective than the Ivies. Along with Vanderbilt and WUSTL, it is one of the most generous with merit aid among the top 20 national universities.</p>
<p>One possibly not-so-good sign is that Rice does not have its own, autonomous Hillel. Rice Hillel is part of Houston Hillel, which also serves Baylor and the University of Houston.</p>
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<p>Just from browsing through the Linguistics course offerings and faculty profiles, it appears to me that Brandeis and Rice have two distinct orientations. Brandeis seems to have a strong Computational Linguistics orientation. Rice seems to focus more on language typology and description. If Sop14 Son truly is interested in Historical Linguistics, then Rice’s department may be closer to what he wants.</p>