<p>I know you’ve already resolved the “argument,” but I just wanted to add in one final note, Antarius. StL may have the highest crime rate in the country as a whole, but you cannot say it is more dangerous than any other area in the country no matter what area you are in. As I said, I’ve never even felt unsafe in an area outside of one of the inner-city ghettos. These ghettos (which most people never even pass by) are particularly bad, which is why the crime rate is so high. The other areas of the city and its outlying area are just as safe and normal as any other area.</p>
<p>Incidentally, just last night there was a hostage situation / police standoff about 10 minutes from where I live. Now you may jump to say that that’s an example of why StL is so unsafe. However, that it happened here actually surprised me (which is saying something, since stuff like that happens everyday across the country). It was a specific and isolated incident, and should not be looked into to be honest.</p>
<p>Oh and it ended pretty well I believe, so yeah.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s what I have to say about StL’s safety and the ridiculous rep it gets. Don’t believe the rankings until you live here; just like you shouldn’t believe the college rankings until you go to them (which you seem to be stating about Rice).</p>
<p>I hate to get dragged into this, since I really don’t care about how WashU is ranked, but I have to take issue with this one tired argument:
Seriously, I don’t know how many times we’ve gone over this, but Texas is a HUGE state, both population- and area-wise. Of course Rice has a large population of students from Texas; it’s the same reason Stanford (last time I checked, at least) has a pretty high percentage of students from California. </p>
<p>Let’s consider Texas’s population in comparison with Missouri. According to Wikipedia, Missouri has a population of 5,987,580. Texas? 24,782,302. That’s more than four times as large. Rice isn’t very much more “regional” than other top schools, it just has fewer states in its surrounding area.</p>
<p>It definitely is. There’s no set percentage of students that are required to be from Texas, and the administration is actually working increasingly hard to increase the school’s geographic diversity.</p>
<p>jym626 – no, there’s currently no Texas requirement, but maybe this is what you had heard:</p>
<p>“The original charter of Rice Institute dictated that the university admit and educate, tuition-free, “the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas.” In 1963, the governing board of Rice University filed a lawsuit to allow the university to modify its charter to admit students of all races and to charge tuition. In 1964, Rice officially desegregated its graduate and undergraduate divisions.[18] Rice began charging tuition for the first time in 1965.”</p>