Rice University

Rice University is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It was chartered in 1891 under the will of merchant William Marsh Rice and opened in 1912. Its campus of about 300 acres borders the Texas Medical Center and the Museum District. Undergraduates live in a residential college system of eleven colleges. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy gave his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech at Rice Stadium.

Rice has eight schools: Architecture, the Jones Graduate School of Business, the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, Humanities, the Shepherd School of Music, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies. It is best known for nanoscience, materials science, bioengineering, chemistry, computational science and music. The Smalley-Curl Institute continues the work of Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering fullerenes at Rice. The Baker Institute for Public Policy is also on campus.

Rice enrolls about 9,000 students, split roughly evenly between undergraduates and graduate students. International students make up a large share of doctoral enrollment in engineering and the natural sciences. The faculty-to-student ratio is low for a research university. Alumni include venture capitalist John Doerr and several NASA astronauts, and aviator Howard Hughes attended the university.

Graduate degrees include research PhDs, which are typically funded through stipends and assistantships, as well as professional science and engineering master's degrees and the MBA at Jones. Doctoral students join faculty research groups early, and many collaborate with Texas Medical Center institutions next door. Rice runs on semesters. Graduate students live in the surrounding neighborhoods of Houston, a large and diverse city with an energy and medical economy.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Rice University lists 70 graduate programs across 32 subjects: 32 master's programs and 37 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in computer science, earth & environmental sciences and biology. Rice University holds rank 34 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.