<p>Here is the text of message from Rice President in December 2004:</p>
<p>First, as a great research university, Rice is able to attract top student and faculty talent from all over the world to Houston, and it is exactly that kind of talent - that is so well-represented in this room tonight - that makes anything possible. I recently learned that if you rank states by their trade imbalance in college freshmen, out of fifty states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, Texas would rank number 49. That is to say that it has a large net outflow of freshmen college students. We are losing more students who choose to leave Texas than almost every other state in the Union. As the most selective institution by far in Texas, Rice has the highest percentage of out-of-state students, and we recruit from an increasingly national and international pool. The University of Houston, by contrast, has only 2.1 percent of its students from outside of Texas. As I said we are at 50 percent and we hope to grow that higher, perhaps to as much as 65 percent. The ability to bring these students here, and have top-rate faculty to teach , them will serve Houston and Texas immeasurably</p>