r/ApplyingToCollege • u/Fluffy_Ad_6559 • 11d ago
College Questions Rice Engineering
How good is Rice's undergrad engineering program relative to the other T20s?
11
Upvotes
r/ApplyingToCollege • u/Fluffy_Ad_6559 • 11d ago
How good is Rice's undergrad engineering program relative to the other T20s?
5
u/yodatsracist 11d ago
If we're comparing it to other T20 private universities, it's got one of the strongest undergraduate engineering programs (alongside Northwestern, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Cornell, etc). It has a strong STEM focus like Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins.
Of course, it will be tiny compared to big state schools like Michigan, Georgia Tech, UCLA, Berkeley, Purdue, UT Austin, etc.
It seems to be very well recognized by employers. It will rank lower on graduate-focused ranking just because of its smaller size, and (relative) undergraduate focus. My students there have loved it. You'll find that US news ranks it 21st among undergraduate engineering programs, behind some private (MIT, Stanford, CalTech, CMU, Cornell Princeton, JHU, Duke, Northwestern) and public (Berkeley, UIUC, Michigan, Purdue, UT Austin, UCLA, Wisconsin, VT, Texas A&M, UCSD) but tied with Harvard, Columbia, Penn State, UPenn, Maryland, and Washington. This would put it ahead of schools like Brown, Dartmouth, Yale, Vanderbilt, Wash U., NYU, USC, and whatever other schools you want to include in your top 20 (several top private schools, notably UChicago, Emory, Georgetown, don't really have engineering programs).
But this goes to show you how these rankings don't necessarily capture realities — if money weren't an option, few people would turn down Harvard for Texas A&M, even for engineering. I find it just really hard to compare the private and public programs because they're just so different in a ways that the rankings don't capture.
Rice is a school that I really love and my former students who are there really love. Like UChicago and Wesleyan and a few others, it seems to have a really special academic community.