A Japanese friend of mine said there was no way she would send her kid to “Gohan Daigaku” (Rice University). Don’t know if many Asians feel the same way.
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Ha! 
yes possibly. But not just Asians - Rice isn’t well known outside the U.S.
I’ve heard a British colleague remark “Rice?! That’s a university?” when another U.S. based colleague mentioned he was a Rice graduate.
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Now that’s funny!
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Perhaps if Rice were to merge with Brown they could market themselves as Brown Rice and receive broader appeal. Or as an alternative perhaps Quinoa College.
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That’s exactly right. This is in a low income, low stats district only 12 miles from the rich, high stats district where my kids attend. Kids in the low stats district mainly do not attend college, and if they do it is at a 2 year school. As neela predicted above, they know the names of the community colleges, but barely have heard the names of the 4 year colleges in our state, and don’t know any of the national high prestige colleges unless those schools happen to excel in football or basketball.
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I’m not surprised. Even though I live in New Jersey which has many high performing school districts and sends tons of kids to the Ivies and T20s, I have met many people from lower income/lower education level areas that haven’t heard of any Ivies beyond Princeton, Harvard and Yale. May have heard of Columbia and Dartmouth but didn’t know they were Ivies. Think UPenn is a state school.
And prior to the late 90s not that many people knew much about Stanford.
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I’m also not surprised. I remember our first move out of the Northeast and I was wearing my Cornell sweatshirt and someone stopped me to chat because they thought I was a Cornell College alumna from Iowa. I realize Cornell isn’t Harvard but in our NE bubble, Cornell was a known entity.
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A Japanese friend of mine said there was no way she would send her kid to “Gohan Daigaku” (Rice University). Don’t know if many Asians feel the same way.
The largest ethnic group at Rice is Asian.
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A few years ago there was a student on here that said that their parents would not let them apply to Dartmouth because it was Dartmouth College and not Dartmouth University.
Lol. A few years back at a dinner for accepted students, we had a family where the dad actually swam the Rio Grande to get a better life here. Ended up as an engineer. He told us a story about his friends asking him about what his very accomplished daughter was going to do. He said she was going to Yale and his friends were shocked that she got into such trouble with the law. Understand he has a heavy Spanish accent where y’s sound like a soft j’s.
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Yes but they’re Asian-Americans. Very few people I know in Asia (and I know plenty through work) have heard of Rice.
Berkeley is very popular in the Asian community. And Harvard. And MIT
The counselors at our CA high school discouraged my biracial kids from applying to Rice and Duke.
Why?
They were very careful about broadly referring to life in the south and how that it might feel different for biracial students. They spoke about college campuses having one set of values but the surrounding community having another.
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I’m not saying that Rice is well-known, far from it. When I went there, the class size was under 700. It’s bigger now, but still lacks the size (and athletics dept.) to be a household name. It is recognized in the “right” circles. I used to have more people stop me when I was wearing my Rice sweatshirt in Cambridge, MA than in my hometown of Mpls. So if it’s not well-known in the US, I wouldn’t expect it to be well-known generally in Asia, but then I imagine that no school outside of a few big names is. I lived 13 years in Europe, and the general public there has no idea about Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Penn, Northwestern, etc. etc. One of the best known is UCLA … because of the sweatshirts. But back to Rice and Asia, Rice has 13% int. students, which is about where (or a little bit higher than) most of the other “similar” schools are. A large majority of the int. students are Chinese, followed by Indian, followed by South Korea. They may not have heard of it, just like they haven’t heard of Emory or Brown, but prospective Asian students seem interested, once they discover the specifics.
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Just one data point, but …
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Rice is still very much a regional university, with some national exposure. However, it’s virtually unheard of outside the US somewhat analogously to the LACs (there’s just not much research horsepower to attract attention)…
I am biracial and spent many of my growing up years in the south. I did live in other parts of the country however (growing up and as an adult) so have that familiarity, too (and particular familiarity with one of the institutions your children were counseled about).
Whether in school or in the community, I have never had any overt racism displayed toward me while living in the south. Any suspected racism was more of the exclusion kind (i.e. not being invited to outside events, etc). My undergrad institution had a noted lack of racial diversity, but my closest friends are still my college friends. The south has a history of poor race relations, but I think that it’s more the fact that those poor race relations were publicized and that poor race relations in other parts of the country did not receive the same degree of attention.
There are definitely problems in the U.S., race relations not least among them. This issue reminds me a little of some of the blue/red conversations people have had when students are looking for a type of university. There are some very red states that have some very blue areas…not just on a university campus, but entire metro areas. Just because a university is in a southern state does not mean that it can’t be an environment safe for minority students.
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I tend to think of these things in tiers, as well, because the minute differences between most of these places make it pointless to number them. They’re all terrific.
Did you mean BU in your Tier 6, or BC? Or both, and you inadvertently left one out? I’d think a ranking relying mostly on academic reputation would include Boston College ahead of Boston University (and probably Rochester, Wake, Wisconsin, Texas, UC San Diego, possibly others).
You may also have forgotten William & Mary, which usually suffers in peoples’ rankings for reasons other than academic reputation. When reminded that it exists, people tend to say “Oh, right, that’s supposed to be a really good school!”
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