<p>danas,
You may know that I have been a strong proponent of Rice which I believe is a very underrated Top 20 school (though certainly not the only one) that is located outside of the Northeast. Their student body has an impressive statistical profile and their graduates really are the gold standard in Texas and the Southwest. I have said many times that if Rice were located in Philadelphia, I believe very strongly that it would be a fixture in the USNWR Top 10. BTW, I am not a graduate of Rice and I have no affiliation to the school. I just think it is a terrific place and very underappreciated, particularly in the Northeast. </p>
<p>Re your comment about the high percentage of Texans (46%), many are surprised when they learn about this, but don’t forget that other top schools also have very high percentages of in-state students, eg, Stanford-44% Californians, Cornell-34% New Yorkers, Caltech-32% Californians and Columbia-26% New Yorkers. This doesn’t seem to have hurt their ranking and certainly not their Peer Assessment scores as compared to Rice’s 4.1 (Stanford-4.9, Cornell-4.6, Caltech-4.7, Columbia-4.6). So I’m not sure why Rice should be marked down for this. And as for size, obviously Caltech is a lot smaller (864 undergrads) and Dartmouth is not tremendously bigger than Rice (4085 undergrads vs 3049 undergrads).</p>