Rice just hired UPenn’s director of admissions as their new vice president for enrollment: http://news.rice.edu/2017/06/12/yvonne-romero-da-silva-named-vice-president-for-enrollment-at-rice/
Thoughts? What sort of direction do they seem to be taking? Any potential changes in admissions?
Looks like Rice wants to extend reach. Particularly URMs and northeast kids. Hiring Da Silva seems like a good idea.
Extending reach–and thus, in effect, expanding its recruiting base–might have a number of practical benefits for Rice: greater national visibility, more applications, lower admissions rate, higher admissions yield, an enhanced sense of “prestige” among potential applicants (which would further increase applications and thus enhance the cycle of desirability), etc.
Such developments would help Rice, a small research university with a historic mission to serve students in Texas, survive in the now-all-important college rankings game, in which its major competitors are typically older, larger, and much better established in the national consciousness.
Still, I hope that in its quest to expand geographical and cultural reach, Rice–a school that already boasts an exemplary degree of demographic diversity–does not follow the Ivies in implementing policies that in effect make admission for “unhooked” applicants well nigh impossible. However much it might be inspired by democratizing ideals, such an approach risks a paradoxical outcome whereby top colleges end up generating a new, identity-based elite preordained to occupy leading positions in government and business.
UPenn’s admissions process is heavily biased toward Early Decision. They fill more than half of their entering class with ED admits, and the ED admit rate is more than triple the RD rate. Rice, as of now, admits less than a third of their entering class ED, with an ED admit rate around 1.5x the RD rate. I wonder if Da Silva will make Rice more like Penn in this regard.