I heard that Rice has insufficient dorms on campus for students for all four years of undergraduate. Would you please share what you know about this situation? For which years of UG are dorms guaranteed? For those who can’t find dorm space on campus, where do they go, what are the living arrangements like off campus, and how much do they pay for rent?
Thank you very much.
I believe freshman and senior year are guaranteed.
The shortage of housing varies from one dorm (college) assignment to the next. It sounds like there is enough housing for about 75% of the students, with housing guaranteed for freshman year. A lot of students move off campus without being forced, so the 25% shortfall is not as bad as it sounds. Also, some students are from the Houston area and can live at home. Maybe 10% are actually forced to move? I don’t know; hopefully a student could provide that information. If a student is forced to move, it is only for one year. Housing is definitely available for three years, and by tradition the students want to live on campus for their senior year. That leaves sophomore or junior year as possibilities for living off campus.
Rice students, because of the engaging residential college experience, generally want to live on campus. This creates high demand. There are “housing jacks” every year where a certain subset of people are eligible to be kicked off (depends on the college if it’s sophomores or juniors). You’ll only be kicked off one year if you’re kicked off at all; for example, I was lucky and not kicked off this upcoming year so I will get to live on campus all four years.
My D will be a junior next year and she is moving to an apartment (and boy are they expensive for Houston) – she can come back to her college in the Senior year. That seems pretty typical
The others are correct that you’re only forced to live off campus a maximum of 1 year. I will be a senior next year and I’ll have lived on campus all 4 years. Scarcity of rooms ebbs and flows with the desire of people to live on campus. I’ll use an example from my college, where the rule is that you can get bumped off junior year. One year almost all of the juniors were bumped for whatever reason. The next year when those juniors were seniors, a relatively large number of them chose to stay off campus because they’d become accustomed to it or liked saving money or whatever. Fewer seniors moved back on solely because more of them had been pushed off the previous year. So then there were actually a ton of spots and we actually had trouble filling all the beds at the college. Part of the problem was also that a lot of the new class of juniors expected to be bumped based off of the previous year and had already secured off-campus housing and couldn’t back out.
A lot of residential colleges also offer other ways to “guarantee” on campus housing. The quotes are there because it usually involves an elected position like college president, vp, etc.
EDIT: Missed the end of your question. There are a variety of places you can go. Off-campus social life is not large or cohesive, and there isn’t an off-campus area that’s just all students like West Campus at UT Austin. Mostly just various scattered apartment buildings or houses close to campus. I’m not a good source for quality per $ because I haven’t lived off campus except one summer. If on campus at Rice costs about 800, then you can do pretty well for that much, especially if you’re living with a few friends. I have friends who live here for a reasonable price I think: http://www.thecircleathermannpark.com/
@jfking01 Thank you for the link. If you know of more apartments near the school please post more.
I am an alum, and I see this question come up every so often on this board. Rice built three additional residential colleges (one in 2002, two in 2009) in order to expand the class size (it used to be 650 a class back when I went to Rice, and the class slowly grew (carefully planned) to 950 a class). And yet Rice still maintained the approximately 75% ratio of housing to students, so I have to think that this is by design - I speculate that it naturally balances out at this number based on student demand.
In my residential college, junior year was the year when students could opt to live off campus in order to get a single senior year (my college had almost entirely doubles but also a number of coveted singles for seniors; every college is set up differently). As much as I loved living on campus freshman and sophomore year, I truly enjoyed my junior year living off campus. It was a great experience and certainly saved me money. I still felt very much a part of on campus life due to the strong ties with my residential college - I had lunch there every weekday, and a place to go when I had spaced out classes and needed a place to study during the day. My group of friends rented two houses/apartments that were close to the Rice Village and an easy walk or bike ride to campus. After living off campus for my junior year, it made senior year even more special, living back on campus (in a single) and really soaking in my last year at Rice.
I have visited Rice twice in recent years as a prospective parent, and much of what I heard echoes what the current students mentioned above - many students live on campus all four years with little difficulty. My tour guide in February was a Jones College sophomore who was going to live on campus his junior year, which is the typical year when the students in his college live off campus. My tour guide the previous year was a Baker College junior who was living on campus, and was also going to live on campus as a senior (so all four years). We had lunch with some Duncan students and there was discussion that they actually had excess rooms for the next year based on supply and demand.