UT v. Rice v. JHU

Colleges and Universities A-Z Rice University
1

TDLR: Can you enlighten me in anyway and show me a different perspective of the schools I’ve listed. Are Rice and JHU worth the extra ~ $10k investment? Is there an obvious place where I should go based on my background and career interests? Which has the best engineering program?

My priority in choosing an undergraduate education is that it propels me in graduate/professional school and in my career and help me pay off my debt. The quality of life , my feel for the campus and student body are secondary, but I recognize that wherever I go I will be spending 4 years of my life there.

I have been accepted to UT as an aerospace major and to Rice and JHU as a biomedical engineering major.
I intend to go on to graduate/professional school after undergraduate.
I am not 100% sure I want to be a biomedical engineer or an aerospace engineer or if I want to go to medical school to become a doctor.
Research opportunities are important to me.
My parents would prefer for me to stay in state (TX)
My parents have not given me constraint on tuition, however, we are a middle-class family of 5 and I am quite sure anything $40,000 - $35,000 would be too unbearable.
Austin would cost $20156 ($25,656.00 - federal loan unsubsidized)
Rice would cost $29,133 (59,133 - 24,500(trustees scholarship) - 5500(fed unsub loan))
JHU would cost $ 28,874.00 (67,174.00 - 32,300(grant) - 2,500(work study) - 3,500(fed unsub loan))

I have visited Rice about 4 times

  • on paper the school makes sense
  • small class size
  • prestige
  • high ranking biomedical engineering major (however the only engineering discipline that ranks)
  • plenty of research opportunities on campus and at the medical center
  • emphasis on diversity
  • high ranking for quality of life
  • high ranking for return on investment on Payscale and the Princeton review
  • residence system is inclusive
  • declare a major by sophomore year (flexible on switching majors)
  • does not have an aerospace engineering
  • Trustee scholarship guaranteed $98,000 scholarship
  • However each time I visited I felt less and less appreciative, it felt too small, not diverse enough and stifling; plus the humidity is horrible. However, these factors are not quite significant. It just means that I don't "love" Rice no matter that it basically checks all the boxes

Now I’ve visited UT and JHU once

  • my tour of UT was a very general and basic campus tour
  • the JHU tour was very in-depth (campus tour, dorms, on-campus lunch, research facilities)

UT

  • I instantly like UT’s campus and could see myself living on campus and in Austin.
  • has several high ranking engineering programs
  • one of the nation’s top engineering program
  • I do not know how difficult it would be to switch engineering disciplines let alone majors, I believe I would have to apply to the other disciplines’ school to switch majors
  • has an aerospace engineering
  • Should I decide to be a different type of engineer I will have a selection of multiple nationally ranked top engineering programs
  • the student body is extremely diverse in ethnicity and socioeconomic status
  • several programs available to make learning more inclusive
  • However UT is a huge school and I might lose creating a connection with professors to write rec letters and have the opportunity to conduct research with. I have some friends who attend UT who've said that it can be difficult to adjust to the environment and make friends since it's so large. Also, they've said that finding research is difficult and usually not offered to freshman and sometimes sophomores.

JHU

  • similar to Rice
  • #1 Biomedical program
  • flexible class scheduling makes it easy to double major and explore courses
  • more ‘prestigious’ than Rice
  • has seasons and snow and I enjoy Baltimore (I have relatives in the area)
  • JHU is extremely comparable to Rice on an academic level and 'prestige' level if not slightly higher ranking and more well known. However, JHU seems to rank low on quality of life, as well as return on investment. Generally, the students seemed to fit the snobbish rich kid stereotype more than any school I had visited.

So can you enlighten me in anyway and show me a different perspective of the schools I’ve listed. Are Rice and JHU worth the extra ~ $10k investment? Is there an obvious place where I should go based on my background and career interests?

My priority in choosing an undergraduate education is that it propels me in graduate/professional school and in my career and help me pay off my debt. The quality of life , my feel for the campus and student body are secondary, but I recognize that wherever I go I will be spending 4 years of my life there.

2

I’d say yes JHU engineering is particularly worth 8k more than UT… If you like jhu. (you already established you don’t like Rice so it’s off the table no matter how 'good on paper’s it may be).
It wouldn’t be as huge and anonymous, and your general comfort in learning would be better.
If you like UT best though, it’s great for engineering. Yes downsides are its size, which can feel a bit alienating and yes it’s hard to get any research position as a freshman or sophomore (are you in an honors program - it helps). It’s like huge state universities. More diverse but less funded (esp. for undergraduate experience,) than a top private research university. So, really, between jhu and UT there’s no wrong choice. Both have pluses and minuses and at this point you should trust yourself.
Note however that if you didn’t like the humidity in Houston I’m not sure it’s going to be fun in Austin, it’s only marginally better there (and it can get quite humid in Baltimore although, granted, it’s more bearable than Texas.) so, I’d remove humid heat from the criteria. :slight_smile:
Perhaps what is comes down to is, can you bear being surrounded by rich kids if it means attending the #1 program in the country for the field you’re interested in ?

3

Thank you for comment. I’d like to clear that I do not completely dislike Rice. I guess I’ve just visited it so many times that it no longer excites me. And thanks for the humidity comment, looks like I will have to deal with it where ever I go :wink:

4

I am from NJ about the same latitude as Baltimore. My daughter goes to rice. On the humidity I will point out that you will mostly be in college in the fall and winter. Hot and humid is a drag but don’t forget about cold and humid. Baltimore in the winter can be cold and damp and dreary Edger Allen Poe anyone, whereas at Rice you could still be taking classes outside and enjoying your walks to campus or evenings out. Freshman start at rice in August and that can be brutal but just as bad is a 38 degree drizzle on a damp chilly day in Baltimore in November. My daughter was gloating on her weather compared to her friends on the east coast at least up until this week

5

ThatIrishKid, for what it’s worth, when I expressed interest in JHU, my guidance counselor steered me away, saying that students from my school who had attended JHU over the years complained bitterly that they had little interaction with top professors and that undergraduates had to completely fend for themselves. She even told me that three students from our school who attended JHU ended up transferring out because they were so unhappy. According to my guidance counselor, these students said that JHU top professors rarely teach undergraduates because they are focused on their research and graduate students, and the professors teaching undergraduates are also under pressure to conduct their own research and to publish, and that it was extremely competitive to win time from them, not to mention to be a part of various projects. So if you think that is the kind of undergraduate atmosphere you’re seeking and you think that will propel you into graduate/professional school and advance your career, good luck.

6

Rice and JHU do enjoy some predictable advantages over UT:

  • Slightly more prestige
  • More attention paid to undergrads
  • Smaller classes
  • Easier access to professors
  • More academic support
  • Probably better dorm rooms/facilities (though you should investigate)

But are they worth the extra money?

I think this: Since you’re talking about $8k-$10k per year, which can be manageable, concentrate on other areas of fit:

  • Academic fit (program availability, ease of entry into program, class sizes, degree requirements/flexibility, etc.)
  • Social fit (social scene, campus vibe, etc.)
  • Dorms/food quality (because you have to live there)
  • Logistics (getting around campus, getting home, etc.)
  • Surrounding city environment, campus environment (culture, opportunities, look/feel, etc.)
  • Weather (JHU as the "four seasons" outlier)

If the three are more or less still tied after that analysis, then I think you should pick UT due to the cost advantage.

However, if you develop a clear favorite, choose that school.

So a tie goes to UT. Otherwise, just pick your favorite.

7

@Maximilias thank you for sharing that about JHU. That’s exactly what happened to my D friend. He’s so unhappy with his college experience at JHU that he had to transfer to Rutgers. Geez. He had so many other merit offers and lost them all to JHU. He didn’t do his homework and pick the right college. Very unfortunate.

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^I think the undergraduate experience is definitely the best at Rice.

9

Glad the OP has mirrored the language I have preached in deciding between schools.

It’s no longer about test scores and other random measurements of “rank”.

Now it’s game time and which school is going to propel success - be the launching pad to grad school and a career.

Sounds like the parents have scratched out Hopkins.

That leaves Rice and UT-A. Money is $9000 or so difference. If you truly want Rice, you can offer to meet your parents in the middle and chip in from summer jobs as well as work at school.

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Just to balance out the discussion here, I’ll offer my JHU perspective as a premed student who went through the program just a few years ago. I’m sorry to hear that some posters have family friends or heard stories from guidance counselors about students who didn’t enjoy their time at Hopkins, but this wasn’t my experience. I value the input of high school guidance counselors since they do hear back from students, and while this particular guidance counselor may have had a negative view, I can tell you Hopkins consistently ranks very well (better than many other top schools) in national surveys of public and private high school guidance counselors. The most recent ranking has Hopkins ranked #3 by high school guidance counselors: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/high-school-counselor, so the opinion of the high school counselor that one poster offered definitely is not the norm of the profession’s opinion nationally.

As for faculty being unavailable, that was not the case for me. I was part of the Neuroscience program, often the third or fourth most popular major at the school (about 250-350 students each year), and I had direct access to faculty for my classes and even the heads of the Neuroscience program. The Department Head, at least while I was there, had an annual pool party in her backyard, dinners at her house with other faculty, helped organize and attended program social and volunteer events, etc. I even had lunch with the President and nine other students at his house (quite a few students get the opportunity over their four years) - the JHU other posters are describing is not at all what I experienced. I never heard of a student transferring out of the school during my four years, maybe it happened, but it definitely wasn’t something I ever observed, let alone a common occurrence. Lastly, faculty everywhere are expected to conduct research and publish, so that shouldn’t be a problem on its own. JHU faculty were expected to hold office hours and, at least in my department ( a very popular and crowded one), faculty always responded to my emails, met with me after class, helped with coursework, invited students to intern in their labs etc.

Is JHU hard? Of course, it is very competitive - don’t attend if you’re not ready to work hard and take courses with other intelligent students. Are JHU students cutthroat (e.g. sabotage labs and hide library reference books)? Of course not. We’re teenagers and young adults just like everyone else, not animals. Group projects and team learning are a staple of almost all upper-level coursework for science courses (and throughout for engineering courses). This is the basis of problem solving in the real world, so of course the most effective educations utilize it, and Hopkins is no different.

I’m not sure when these stories of miserable students occurred or what programs they were in. Additionally, there are many factors that affect your happiness beyond a university’s efforts to make class grading fair, workload reasonable and offering social activities for students. The school provides tons of intramural activities, school-wide volunteer and social events, counseling services (both peer and professional), student interest groups, etc. They did all that they could (in my mind) to facilitate a happy and healthy student body, but yes, ultimately the onus is on you to talk to people, make friends and take care of yourself. It isn’t a tiny school. 1500 kids in a class should be enough for you to find a few friends at the very least. The school also prides itself in its diversity. Being in Baltimore (and a leader in public health, education, etc) the school is very cognizant of minority issues, poverty, etc., and so the school prioritizes a diverse class each year (Rice has a 0.69 diversity index to JHU’s 0.65, quite comparable, and both are high scoring): http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/campus-ethnic-diversity/page+2. Issues such as shyness, mental health (a legitimate concern for students everywhere), family problems, poor study habits, etc. can also be the root of the unhappiness, so I wouldn’t be too quick to blame a university when there are many, many factors outside of their control if students don’t ask for help.

Building up an entire university to be this sinister place where fun goes to die and students push each other into oncoming traffic just seems too melodramatic to be believable. Do some people not enjoy it? Sure. That can happen at any school, and it can be a combination of the people they happened to live around, the student’s own social skills, study habits, etc. Things happen. Just don’t let a few stories lead you to believe it is necessarily the school’s fault and that every student graduating is either a survivor or a monster. That just isn’t what I saw, and I wait to hear from another JHU student to disagree with me since I just haven’t heard anything like that from actual students.

I don’t mean to discount what other’s have said. I believe them, but I am hesitant to blame the school when there clearly are so many other contributors to such complex problems. It’s so radically different from my own experience I just had to say something. That’s my two cents.

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NixonDenier (what exactly is a Nixon denier?), in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the three students my guidance counselor spoke of took place during the course of the last nine years, which isn’t exactly ancient history. I was merely sharing information and not in any way trying to create monsters. I completely acknowledge that JHU is an outstanding university. That’s why I expressed interest in JHU to begin with. I wish our country had more institutions like JHU because of all the good it does. And your points are all well taken, but according to my guidance counselor, and she has been a rock, the two university’s, Rice’s and JHU’s, approach to undergraduate education is quite different. And so I guess my question is, in your experience at JHU, did you find the undergraduate experience to be more collaborative or more individually competitive? And was your good experience also shared by your classmates? I’m sure your answer would be of interest to ThatIrishKid.

12

I second nixon’s sentiments. I graduated from Hopkins and had an absolute blast there along with my classmates. Getting research with professors is easy - I along with all my close friends not only did research but got published with top notch professors. We hardly had to fight for them - it was the converse , Professors were excited to see undergrads motivated enough to purse research. It’s how I ended up getting a full multi-year fellowship from Stanford and graduated with a Ph.D. while many of my other friends graduated with advanced degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, etc. Professors have a strong open door policy and encourage under research. See the PURA program at Hopkins that may other universities have emulated. Students know Hopkins is hard, but we kept each other sane. Who wants to be competitive and have no social life? I sure didn’t, and again, neither did most of my classmates or friends.

Also, regardless of distinction, most professors teach undergrads. Adam Reiss (nobel prize winning physicist) teaches undergrads as do most of the other professors.

Hopkins has a 94% 6 year graduation rate, 35% alumni donation rate - top 10 in the country, and 97% freshman retention rate (all indications in line with peers or above for student satisfaction).

Rice? a very poor 86% graduation rate in 6 years. Couple this with the fact that 40% of admitted students choose Hopkins (versus 34% at Rice) - it would indicate more people are inclined to want to be at Hopkins and stay to graduate instead of transferring out versus Rice.

Sources:
https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/johns-hopkins-university
https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/rice-university

Perhaps the Hopkins quality of life is not as bad or the Rice quality of life picture is not as rosy as some on here might lead you to believe. You’ll have no shortage of opportunity for research or a top graduate school at Hopkins or Rice should you work hard. But try to get first hand info from actual Hopkins or Rice students enrolled there now - don’t base any life altering decisions on hearsay. And you don’t have to sacrifice fun either

13

Also speaking of high school counselors thoughts on both universities:

Hopkins garners a high school counselor rating of 4.9 out of 5.0 - 2nd in the country after Harvard, and in line with Stanford and Yale amongst others, (rating from a national survey of high school counselors for US News to assess the undergraduate education afforded by each of these schools).

Rice garners a 4.5 FYI.

Source:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/jhu-2077/rankings

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rice-3604/rankings

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Nixondenier (And what again is a NixonDenier? Someone who denies that Nixon did the things he did or that he existed? Is this a political movement?), you write: “Building up an entire university to be this sinister place where fun goes to die and students push each other into oncoming traffic just seems too melodramatic to be believable.” Really? Who here is doing that? You’re the one who sounds melodramatic.

And to blah2008, who wrote “don’t base any life altering decisions on hearsay.” The information I offered was not hearsay. It came from my guidance counselor, who has been a guidance counselor for sixteen years. She’s real, and the students from my school she told me about who went to Hopkins and transferred out are real. And I’m sure that what happened to newjersey17’s daughter’s friend is real, too.

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3 out of how many exactly? I know literally hundreds of Hopkins students that loved their time there. You have a small sample size to say the least. I personally know 5 people that transferred from Rice to Duke/Stanford because they did not fit in with the nerdy/quirky vibe at Rice - but this means Rice’s undergrad life isn’t great right?

See above for quantified counselor ratings of Hopkins versus Rice nationwide. I too had a high school counselor who had been at her job for 3 decades. She strongly recommended Hopkins over Rice and Emory. Should I have trusted your counselor more than mine? In retrospect, a resounding no.

16

Blah2008, I’m sure that there are many Rice graduates who have gone on to earn their Ph.D.s from Stanford, as you have, and other great universities, and who would no doubt talk about their wonderful undergraduate experience at Rice, but I suspect that the reason they’re not on this site doing so, particularly on a Friday night, is because they obviously have better things to do with their life than spend their evenings prowling the Rice College Confidential site, trying to convince SomeotherIrishKid or AnotherChiChiRiley to attend Rice instead of JHU. I’m on this site because I’m a senior who is quite certain I will attend Rice. Maybe years from now I will visit this site when my son or daughter is getting ready to chose a school and I can share information. But I hope that after I earn my Ph.D. from wherever, I will have better things to do than to prowl JHU’s College Confidential site trying to convince college seniors why Rice is better than JHU. Hopefully by then I’ll have a very different life than the one I have now as a prep school senior. And I can assure you that I certainly won’t be spending my Friday nights on this site like you. So who’s the Geek now?

With all your endless references to US News and World Report stats and rankings (a very questionable basis on which to make a decision about which college one will be most happy and successful) one would think you were an admissions officers on this site. And maybe you are—working to make JHU’s stats better, mustering up all the JHU admits you possibly can. Good luck.

17

@blah2008… Let me give you some facts and not opinion! JHU is a very post graduate focused college. Does not mean that it is not a good undergraduate institution. But it is better known for post graduate studies. Why ? Here are the facts… e…g. Rice Undergraduate enrollment: 3950, Graduate enrollment around 2000. JHU … Undergraduate class 6500, Post Graduate: 15,000.

Rice and JHU are within a few in terms of undergraduate rankings (no matter which you look at … US News, Niche, etc.) but in terms of Graduate school Rice is far behind JHU in all rankings. Following are examples.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2016/world-ranking#!/page/1/length/25/country/93/sort_by/rank_label/sort_order/asc/cols/rank_only

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2015.html

Notice schools like Rice, Brown, Dartmouth are way behind some of the other elite private schools and some of the elite public schools like UT, Michigan, Berkeley etc. Why? Because Rice, Brown, Dartmouth type schools are very much a Undergraduate focused schools! I graduated from Carnegie and have many professors that I am friends with and the focus of these graduate schools is very much on Research and publishing research (and since you are a Phd you should be very familiar with that). Rice type schools are very undergraduate friendly and their whole existence is based on providing an unparalleled undergrad education.

My son goes to Rice. I serve on Carnegie Mellon admission council. I would hope I know a bit more than an average person commenting on this site about colleges as I am involved in recruiting and evaluating both undergraduate and graduate level students. I by no means am saying that JHU is not a great institution. But having said that, Rice is a undergraduate focused school. That is Rice’s priority and that is not the case with JHU. That is a fact based on the evidence I sighted above. Does that make Rice experience better? That is for Rice and JHU alumni to debate, not me.

18

Maximilias, you ever think i might be in a different timezone traveling for a job? When you mature and graduate from college and maybe grad school, you will learn better.

19

TinTin, i concur with you some colleges such as dartmouth, brown, rice are undergrad focused. The others such as harvard, stanford, cornell, hopkins, columbia etc, have more of an emphasis on graduate school. Whether one is “better” than the other for undergrad education is debatable (a smaller grad population does make the potential for professor attention greater, but it’s not uniform. Hopkins and some of the others with larger grad school enrollments have in fact smaller average course class sizes than rice as an example).

But given the OP wants to get a Ph.D in engineering, which was my field of study, there would be ostensible benefits in going to a research powerhouse. Professors who are at the top of their fields are at research powerhouses. Their recommendations go a long way as i know firsthand should he do research with them. Im not going to say hopkins is better than rice in undergrad, that is again debatable. But there are certainly merits to both institutions.

20

Blah2008, your comment “you ever think I might be in a different time zone traveling for a job?” Is that an example of the “nerdy/quirky” humor you accuse Rice students of? You know what? It’s too bad you didn’t go to Rice. I think you would have loved it. You would have fit right in and had a great time.