<p>exactly… thats the thing. On an engineering standpoint, Rice is on par with MIT and Cornell… but why “lower ivies”</p>
<p>harvard isnt where you go to do chemical engineering…</p>
<p>MIT is superior to Rice in engineering. MIT is probably the best place to do engineering anywhere in the world. Whilst Rice’s engineering is already great, it isn’t on par with MIT yet. The only 2 schools that are potential rivals of MIT in engineering are Stanford and Berkeley. </p>
<p>Rice graduate business school is also not yet top 15. And I’m not sure how Rice would break into the top 15 anytime soon. </p>
<p>Rice’s undergrad education, however, is definitely a top 10 program. I’d rank it on par with Dartmouth, Penn and Columbia, and above Brown and Cornell.</p>
<p>OK, this arguing about Rice is becoming a moot point.</p>
<p>Rice’s supposed “lack” of recognition is unfounded, unless you care about the average Joe on the street who thinks Duke is awesome for basketball and is surprised that its known for academics, and so forth.</p>
<p>Rice matters to the people who matter. In terms of general popularity aka the common average American, many think Stanford is an Ivy, and no one has heard of Dartmouth or Brown, etc. The Rice name, however, is well-known to relevant employers and graduate schools. We do not need to keep beating a dead horse.</p>
<p>RML, I’m not saying your comments are completely worthless, but you haven’t even attended college yet let alone been through the college application process, so please keep your “rankings” to a minimum. I respect your opinion but it’s getting tiring after you keep repeating yourself and for no point either.</p>
<p>My own input? Penn’s biomedical/bioengineering department is phenomenal, as well as Princeton’s engineering. Otherwise, Cornell is the strongest overall out of the Ivies. At any rate, Rice provides just as good of an undergraduate engineering education as any of the top 20 schools, so I advise anyone to stop worrying - and with this I’ve digressed from the main topic, which is Rice’s lack of recognition (which I have previously addressed).</p>
<p>RML - you need to back up your claims</p>
<p>CALTECH is clearly on par with MIT in engineering… im not sure where your stats and rankings come from</p>
<p>Antarius, I can give you several league tables that would show us that MIT is the best school for engineering. The question now is, can you show me a league table that say otherwise? LOL</p>
<p>hotasice, I’m now in the process of getting into grad business school.</p>
<p>if you read the above posts - that point was never disputed…</p>
<p>This is what im talking about</p>
<p>“But in general, grad engineering and business programs aren’t top caliber. It’s undergrad, however, is one of the very best out there, or on par with the lower ivies, at least.”</p>
<p>"The only 2 schools that are potential rivals of MIT in engineering are Stanford and Berkeley. "</p>
<p>“MIT is superior to Rice in engineering.” - EVEN this… what engineering? </p>
<p>these are the statements that need backing up. There are way too many value judgments made by you</p>
<p>the ONLY 2 schools that rival MIT ? like where did that come from?</p>
<p>In terms of ECE, Carnegie Mellon is one of the top schools in the world. Look it up</p>
<p>There is more to engineering that Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT</p>
<p>You are all arguing about “image”, but the point you are missing is that many many students are not happy at some of the most “competitive” schools, because they are so competitive and they work you to death.
Make no mistake, Rice is very very hard and they work hard, but there is time for play, as well.
My son, a recent grad, walked right into a job out of the computer science major and also over the years had great internships with top companies. Almost Half his graduating major went to Microsoft. They know Rice, as do all grad schools and great companies.
He heard from some of his friends who also went to top schools that many others were NOT as happy as he was during those four years, yet he ended up doing incredibly well.
MIT is better for Grad school anyway. So you shouldn’t only look for image, you must look for substance and pick the school that is right for you…and NOT your competitive parents, relatives and other people in your life who have no ireal dea what’s going on todayin higher education.
Rice is a fabulous school AND no school is perfect.</p>
<p>Only Rice has produced an undergrad and PhD (Thesis-A Characterization of the Set of Asymtotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc) who quarterbacked an NFL championship team.</p>
<p>Antarius, You’re giving me the impression that you do not understand what does --in general-- means. lol</p>
<p>In general, MIT is superior to any school in engineering. At the moment, several schools offer great engineering programs of varied fields. But in general, only Stanford and Berkeley are MIT’s fiercest rivals when it comes to engineering. Rice, CMU, GoargiaTech, UCLA, Michigan, Northwestern, Cornell, Caltech and several others have very strong engineering programs. However, they are by no means as competitive and as prestigious as MIT’s, in general.</p>
<p>Do you honestly think MIT is just as good as Rice for engineering? You’ve got to be kidding me boy!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s true and I won’t contest that. But that’s beside the point. </p>
<p>Look, I like Rice. I applied way back my time and I was accepted. I didn’t enroll because I like Cambridge more. But Rice is one of my top 5 target schools back then, despite its obvious lack of name recognition internationally. </p>
<p>Rice, like I said over and over again, is excellent for engineering in the undergrad level. I can compare it with Mudd, Princeton, Cornell, UPenn or Columbia for undergrad engineering. But as a whole (undergrad, grad and postgrad across all engineering fields) it does not compare to the super powerhouse such as MIT. And I can’t understand why Antarius couldn’t understand that.</p>
<p>Regarding the topic heading of this thread, the following was posted in the engineering sub-forum by a Rice alum, decide for yourself :</p>
<p>"I just know that at the smaller schools, it was a lot more difficult to get the attention of key companies, and it would often feel like we had to jump up and down, waving our resumes over our heads in order to get someone to talk to us. </p>
<p>My school wasn’t particularly well-known for the program that I attended outside of the school’s geographic region, and though those of us who chose to stay in the field (there were a few engineers-turned-lawyers/businessmen) ended up at the top two or three grad programs in the field, some of us only went to grad school because we had a terrible time attracting the attention of companies we actually wanted to work for. </p>
<p>Now that we have degrees from those “powerhouse” schools, everyone wants to hire us, but we wouldn’t even <em>get</em> recruiters in our field at our career fairs when I was an undergrad. It was a little frustrating-- we were supposed to have these degrees from a really great school and nobody wanted to talk to us."</p>
<p>Would love to know when that alum graduated… It’s hard to imagine a top 17 university not being known by companies. They’re doing a lot to get the name out there.</p>
<p>"Would love to know when that alum graduated… "</p>
<p>IIRC, the alum recently finished an engineering grad program ( Master’s, I’m pretty sure), straight out of undergrad, and is now working, so answer is probably 3-6 years ago.</p>
<p>Thanks, I think things are a bit better now.</p>
<p>Let me tell you this, there are people in the world that don’t even know that Dartmouth is a Ivy. Or that Caltech is a great school. Or the Rice has a BioE program that is actually better than Harvard. And there are even people that don’t even know that pre-med is not a major.
Simple to put it this way, it doesn’t matter what the school’s reputation is to common people, employers know a whole lot more about the colleges than you do. They have experienced people from that school</p>
<p>
Sounds like it turned out okay… 
I wonder what not-well-known program she attended at Rice…</p>
<p>i dunno… that seems like a weird case. not what i have heard from alums</p>
<p>my cousin in a Jones School Alum from 15 years ago and is doing very well in life</p>
<p>When it comes to best Ivy League college for engineering I think the best would be Cornell, followed closely by Princeton and from there I don’t know.</p>
<p>As for Rice’s engineering reputation, its not really known for engineering like MIT is but Rice does have a strong undergrad program. Rice’s engineering has its advantages and disadvantages just like every other college. Since the school itself is smaller than a school like Berkeley I believe that the engineering students at Rice probably receive more attention from the professors and perhaps more money per student than at do those at Berkeley.</p>
<p>Not really surprised at that alum’s problems, although I would like to know what “key companies” he wanted to work for. I’ve heard engineers frustrated by the fact that a lot of the engineering companies are oil/gas related. Tough beans, you go to school in a city that is considered one of the top 3 or 4 energy cities in the world. I know people that are working for NASA, Boeing, etc., so it’s not like there isn’t any variety. If you went to Michigan, you (would have been) recruited by automakers, manufacturing, etc. </p>
<p>Also, while Rice is a premier institution, it is very small, and is not located on the East Coast. It also has a good public university in the same state, similar to Stanford/Berkeley, UNC/Duke, UIUC/Northwestern, so it, like those other schools, have to compete with schools that have 4x as many students as they do, or in Rice’s case, roughly 10x.</p>
<p>In short, you have to remember that Texas is unique as a state. Many people that have never lived here before don’t want to come here because of the supposed stereotypes. This contributes heavily to Rice’s “regionality”. Yet people call Rice a regional school, when it is the top school (other than Stanford) that is west of the Mississippi. Texas is a huge state, so Rice’s reputation covers a lot more “ground” than you might think.</p>
<p>However, I do preface these statements by saying that it will be a lot easier to get a job in Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio, than it will be in San Francisco/Philadelphia/Boston/New York. Just look at the post-grad surveys, almost 3/4 of the grads that were entering the workforce took jobs in Texas, with 80% of those people taking jobs in Houston. I am sure that the numbers are somewhat similar for schools like NYU, Northwestern, USC, Stanford and their respective states/cities.</p>
<p>Houston has headquarters of many, many multinational corporations - and quite a few Rice grads do start out at these companies in Houston, and then move to other locations with the companies, or move on to other companies. Compared to most cities now, Houston still has a decent job market.</p>