Often billed as the Harvard of the South, Rice University, USA boasts a teacher-student ratio of 1:5 and outstanding faculty which includes Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners. Set in a 285 acre wooded campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University, although low profile internationally, enjoys an enviable reputation in the US for its high quality academic programmes, teaching and research. The US News and World Report (2007) ranked it 17th among America’s best colleges and it is heralded as one of the New Ivies by the Kaplan/ Newsweek College Guide. Often billed as the Harvard of the South, Rice combines the small size and teaching emphasis of a liberal arts college with the scholarship of a major research university. It boasts a teacher-student ratio of 1:5 and outstanding faculty which includes several Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners as well as Fullbright scholars. Founded in 1912 as the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art, Rice University was named after the eponymous Massachusetts-born businessman who endowed the institute with $4.1 million as a gift to the city of Houston, where he made his fortune. Since then the endowment corpus of Rice University has grown to $4.1 billion the fifth-highest per capita among US universities. This huge corpus allows the university to charge lower tuition, room, and board fees than most comparable private universities. Consequently Rice is routinely rated a best buy school. A member of the Association of American Universities, Rice offers an eclectic range of academic subjects across six schools (see box) to its approximately 3,000 undergrads and 2,000 postgrads. A private, non-sectarian and co-education institution, Rice follows an Oxford-inspired residential college system which requires every freshman to be assigned to one of the university’s nine colleges(Baker, Brown, Hanszen, Jones, Lovett, Martel, Sid Richardson, Wiess, and Will Rice). Houston. The administrative capital of the Lone Star state of Texas, Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States with a population of 4.7 million. It is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center; the Texas Medical Center, (the world’s largest centre for medical research, education, and patient care) and the base of 21 Fortune 500 companies. Promoted as the urban forest, Houston boasts more than 508 parks and open areas, an arboretum, a rose garden, Japanese gardens, and seven golf courses. Houston summers are hot with temperatures averaging 90oF during the height of summer, which lasts about 95 days. But the winters are pleasant, with average temperatures in the 60s, and snow or ice is a rarity. Campus facilities. Rice University sprawls across 285 acres of heavily-wooded land adjoining Hermann Park, Houston’s most historically significant public green space, and the Houston Museum District. Next door is the world’s largest medical complex, the Texas Medical Center, and a neighborhood commercial centre, known as Rice Village. The university campus also houses several inter-disciplinary research institutes, schools and think tanks including the Rice Architecture School, James Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice Engineering Design and Development Institute, the Rice Design Alliance, and…
