Rice University has announced an ambitious plan for enrollment growth that could significantly ... [+]
Rice University has announced a plan to increase its undergraduate enrollment by 20%, the equivalent of adding 800 undergraduate students over the next four years. The Rice plan was approved by its board of trustees this week, and it sets an agenda for growth in many aspects of the university, including faculty, facilities, research and graduate studies.
It may also set an example for other elite colleges that they can increase the diversity of their student bodies through well-planned enrollment growth.
Rice currently enrolls about 4,000 undergraduate students and just over 3,500 graduate students. Under the plan, its undergraduate enrollment would reach 4,800, and its graduate enrollment would also increase so that total enrollment would stand at about 9,000 students by fall 2025. Currently ranked the nation’s 16th best national university by U.S. News and World Report, Rice is one of the smaller elite research universities in the U.S.
In addition to larger student enrollment, the Rice plan includes:
- opening a 12th residential college and increasing the number of students who live on campus by about one-third to 3,525,
- adding about 50 full-time instructional faculty so it can maintain the existing undergraduate student-faculty ratio,
- building additional facilities, including a new engineering building, a new building for the visual and dramatic arts, the additional residential college, and a new student center,
- enhancing its research capabilities by focusing on some of its areas of scholarly excellence in materials research, clean energy, and new technologies for national security.
The planned expansion follows an approximately 35% increase in undergraduate enrollment between fall 2005 and 2013, in addition to growth in Rice’s graduate programs. If it achieves its 2025 goal, Rice’s student body will have grown by about 80% in two decades.
Student interest in a Rice education is high, just as it is at other premier universities in the nation. Applications to the university have grown about 75% over the last four years,and for fall 2021, Rice received 30,000 applications, a 26% increase over the prior year. In 2004, Rice received about 11 applications for every entering student; by 2020, the ratio had grown to roughly 28 applicants for every student opening.
Part of the growth stems from the increasingly generous financial aid that Rice has introduced, known as the Rice Investment. But the surge seen for fall 2021 also likely reflects the university’s adoption of a test-optional admissions policy, a decision it has extended to applicants for the 2021-2022 academic year.
Commenting on the plan, Rice President David Leebron said, “Rice’s extraordinary applicant pool has grown dramatically despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. With the previous expansion we greatly increased our national and international student applications, enrollment and visibility. We also dramatically increased diversity on our campus, and we were able to extend the benefits of a Rice education to many more students. As before, we must undertake this expansion carefully in order to assure that we retain the best aspects of Rice culture, student experience and sense of community.”
One of the motivating factors (but admittedly not the only one) behind the plan is to help Rice enroll a more diverse body of students. In terms of race/ethnicity, about 10% of its students are Black and 15% are Hispanic. Asian students constitute 26% of the student body. Counting students of other races, more than half of Rice’s students identify as a racial/ethnic minority.
In terms of family background, however, only about 16% of its undergraduates are eligible for a Pell Grant, a standard proxy for students who hail from low- to moderate-income families. That’s about average for the percentage of undergraduates at America’s most highly-ranked colleges who are Pell recipients, but it’s far less than the national average for all colleges - overall, a bit more than a third of undergraduate students receive a Pell Grant.
Rice’s decision to increase its entering classes will give it an opportunity to improve those numbers, and that’s important because top colleges - both public and private – do significantly better than lower-rated institutions in graduating Pell recipients.
The problem is that because too many elite schools admit far fewer Pell students than the national average their “Pell payload” – the overall contribution to education-driven social mobility - is less than what it could be.
Even though the number of Pell recipients graduating from the nation’s most esteemed colleges is relatively small given their resources and expressed commitment to educating students without regard to financial standing, it doesn’t need to stay this way. Several elite colleges like Rice, as well as other public and private colleges, that have joined the American Talent Initiative have committed to admitting substantially more Pell recipients. But as that initiative has demonstrated, it takes more than a commitment to succeed; it requires an intentional, adequately resourced strategy.
The Rice plan affords a straightforward path to increasing the socioeconomic diversity of students studying at America’s leading universities. Accept more of them, and they will come. There is an abundance of well-qualified applicants, and elite institutions can afford to admit more of them and educate them well. The perennial top 20 institutions have multi-billion-dollar endowments; Rice’s is in excess of $6 billion. Harvard’s endowment is now over $40 billion, Yale’s exceeds $30 billion. Among other elites, Stanford has an almost $29 billion endowment, Vanderbilt’s tops $8 billion, and even the University of California, Berkeley, although a public institution, has amassed an endowment of about $5 billion.
And, as the Rice plan demonstrates, enrollment growth can - and should - be integrated with other campus plans so that it reflects and advances all of a university’s historical missions. If educating more diverse students is a genuine priority, admitting more of them and providing the necessary financial and educational support for their success are the obvious steps that must be taken. Rice’s board of trustees has embraced that challenge.
Now, the question becomes, will more top-ranked universities follow Rice’s lead. They should. If the nation’s leading colleges want to make good on their promise of advancing economic mobility, strategically increasing undergraduate enrollment must become an imperative, more important perhaps than high student selectivity, instructional expenditures per student, or other indicators of exclusivity.
As President Leebron told me in a telephone interview yesterday, "Three values are deeply embedded at Rice - excellence, opportunity, and impact. We see the expansion as a way for Rice to become an even stronger engine of opportunity because it will allow us to serve more of the students who have traditionally been underserved by higher education. We believe we can extend our impact this way and maintain the campus support and environment that makes for an outstanding education.”
