Rice University

Departmental research and instruction, and other institutional activities. Rice University is accredited by the Southern Association Of Colleges And Schools Commission On Colleges (SACS-COC), Accreditation Board For Engineering And Technology (ABET), International Association for Management Education (AACSB International), National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), and the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Rice serves approximately 4,500 undergraduate and 4,000 graduate students, as well as 13,000 life-long learners. For the cohort entering Fall 2017 the six-year undergraduate graduation rate is 95.7 percent. Rice offers more than 50 undergraduate majors across six schools of study: Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Humanities, Music and Architecture. In conjunction with various majors, students can take courses that satisfy the requirements for admission to medical, dental, law or graduate school, or that lead to teacher certification. The university offers four online master's degrees to deliver education to working professionals who may not have the option to study on campus: MBA@Rice, Master of Computer Science, Master of Data Science, and Master of Engineering Management and Leadership. The university also offers online courses for credit and for life-long learning, both during the academic year and in summer sessions. To date, over 2 million learners have enrolled in computer science, engineering, physics, and other courses taught by Rice's award-winning faculty, and 90,000 learners have completed at least one online course. Rice University has an undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio of 6 to 1. In general, classes are small enough for each professor to know every student's name, so there is ample opportunity for personal attention. Rice is ranked among the top 20 nationally by the US News and World Report in the 2025 edition, as in every edition since first ranked in 1988, and the Princeton Review ranked Rice in the top ten for "Happiest Students," "College with Great Financial Aid," "Best Career Placement, "LGBTQ-friendly" among other accolades in the 2020 edition. In Kiplinger's "Best College Values" 2019, Rice ranks No. 5 among private universities and No. 8 among private and public schools combined. Rice offers over 70 masters and doctoral degrees in the Humanities, Liberal Studies, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, Music, and Business. Graduate programs are small to medium-sized, offering the opportunity to work closely with graduate advisors. Proximity to both the Houston Museum District and the renowned Texas Medical Center allows for exceptional access to the visual arts as well as cutting-edge biomedical research. The many interdisciplinary centers and institutes enhance the experience of students across all disciplines. The school attracts more than 16,000 enrollments each year to its non-credit and credit programs. Rice is located in Houston, Texas, the nation's fourth-largest city, the energy capital of the world and a dynamic international business and cultural center, on a 300-acre, tree-lined campus just a few miles from downtown.

Operations of a library that serves students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of William Marsh Rice University and is open to the public by charter. The Fondren Library subscribes to approximately 72,000 current journals (print and electronic) and houses over 3,032,000 print volumes and 3,276,000 units of microforms. The collections include audiovisuals, music recordings, scores, and other special formats. An increasing amount of library resources are provided online. The library is a selective depository for U.S. and Texas government publications and a depository for documentation of U.S. patents and trademarks. The Brown Fine Arts Library contains over 200,000 volumes related to art, architecture, classical archaeology, and music. All library patrons are welcome to use fine arts materials and facilities, including listening equipment, VHS, DVD, and Laserdisc players. The Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Business Information Center provides additional specialized resources in its nearby space, designed by noted architect Robert A.M. Stern.

Basic scientific research and training and other sponsored educational programs. From its inception, Rice has been dedicated, in the words of its first president Edgar Odell Lovett,"As much to investigation as to instruction to providing a setting in which faculty would join the "pleasures of teaching" with "the privileges of research." The university has realized much of this ambition with distinction in undergraduate education and research excellence across many disciplines. Rice is home to more than 40 interdisciplinary research centers, institutes and consortia, and research is a fundamental part of the undergraduate experience. The university has produced Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Watson Fellows, Mellon Fellows, National Science Foundation Fellows, and Rhodes Scholars among other honors and awards. The university has a very high level of research activity for its size, with $205 million in sponsored research funding in 2024. Rice is noted for its applied science programs in the fields of artificial heart research, structural chemical analysis, signal processing, space science and nanotechnology. It was ranked in the top 10% of institutions based on citations per faculty per academic analytics data. Rice has 683 full-time and 196 part-time faculty members. Ninty-nine percent of full-time faculty hold Ph.D.s or equivalent terminal degrees in their field. Because of their pioneering research, Rice faculty have been honored with numerous prestigious awards and accolades over the years. In 1996, Rice professors Richard Smalley and Robert Curl (now deceased) received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of a unique molecular form of carbon that heralded the new era of nanotechnology research. In 2011, Richard Tapia, a Rice mathematician and longtime champion of diversity In U.S. education, received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for his work in optimization theory and numerical analysis, as well as for his mentoring of women and under-represented minorities in the fields of mathematics and science. As of February 2018, Rice had 12 faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering, 10 in the National Academy of Science, four in the Institute of Medicine, and six in the National Humanities Center. In 2016, Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum won a prestigious Macarthur Fellowship. Rice's commitment to scientific research can be seen in the construction of the Bioscience Research Collaborative, a 488,000- square-foot facility where scientists and educators from Rice and other Texas Medical Center institutions work together on research that benefits human medicine and health, and the Brockman Hall for Physics, a state-of-the-art 110,000 square-foot facility that includes vibration and noise controlled underground laboratories. Rice also has an active research agenda in the social sciences and humanities. The Baker Institute for Public Policy is one of the leading nonpartisan public policy think tanks in the country and conducts research on domestic and foreign policy issues. The Humanities Research Center fosters international and interdisciplinary connections with workshops and large conferences. Focus areas include questions of energy and energy transitions, the Civic Humanists program, and the Our Americas Archive Partnership.