Rice to increase enrollment, add new buildings in $300M project
Rice University is known throughout Houston as a small private school “beyond the hedges.”
Though the hedges aren’t going anywhere, the elite university plans to embark on one of its biggest expansions in the last 100 years.
David Leebron, university president, said Rice will increase its student body to about 9,000 from the current 7,500 and expand the footprint of the 300-acre campus with four new buildings, including a new residence hall.
“The overall strategic plan is to increase both the opportunities Rice provides and the impact that it has on the world — nationally, in our state and locally,” Leebron said last week as he announced the plans. But he added officials have taken into consideration how large the small university should be.
“Rice does have a distinctive sense of community and culture,” he said, “and when we plan this, we’re very careful about how to plan and still preserve Rice’s sense of community, student experience and the Rice culture — the trilogy.”
The $300 million physical expansion includes a 12th residential
college, a new engineering building and a building for the visual and dramatic arts. A new student center funded partly by a $15 million donation from the Brown Foundation will largely replace the Rice Memorial Center.
Adjaye Associates, the international architectural firm that designed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., will design the three-story, 80,000-square-foot student center. Leebron said Rice chose the firm for its bold, creative design.
British architect David Adjaye, founder of the firm, said he was humbled to work on the Rice center, calling it an inspiring project.
“Responding to the architectural history of the university, the city of Houston and the region, the student center will come to embody its position at the heart of the campus, fostering catalytic connections between undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff,” Adjaye said.
The facility will include a multicultural center, a rooftop auditorium, a variety of gathering and event spaces, and a memorial to 10 Navy ROTC students from Rice who died in 1953 when their plane crashed en route to a training mission in Virginia.
The university plans to break ground on the center in the first quarter of 2022 and complete construction by fall 2023. Although a majority of the Rice Memorial Center will be demolished, aspects including the chapel and cloisters will remain, officials said.
Houston-based Kendall/ Heaton Associates will serve as executive architect, and Tellepsen will provide pre-construction services, according to a release.
Increasing enrollment
The Rice board of trustees approved a plan that will scale up the number of students annually over five years and by fall 2025 will increase the full-time teaching faculty by nearly 50.
The number of undergraduate students, which was a little more than 4,000 last fall, will rise by 20 percent, to 4,800 by fall 2025, according to a release. The number of graduate students is also expected to grow, which will bring total enrollment to around 9,000 students.
Current enrollment, including doctoral students, is about 7,500 for the entire school, according to the university.
With a record-high 2,749 applicants offered admission for the class of 2025, Rice has already started the enrollment expansion. Officials say it will be the largest freshman class in university history, with students from all 50 states and 68 countries.
From 2005 to 2025, Rice is expected to see an 80 percent expansion of the student body.
Officials predict the campus expansion and increased enrollment will help Rice recruit more talented faculty for teaching and research. That in turn will create a larger alumni network across the globe, as well as a more diverse campus. In fall 2020, 43 percent of Rice’s students were white, 26 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Black and 6 percent who identified as other.
Rice’s projected growth follows two decades of expansion at the college and a surge in applications. Applications for admissions increased by about 75 percent over the last four years, with a particular spike following the university’s launch of the Rice Investment in 2018. The financial aid program offers a range of assistance to undergraduates with family incomes up to $200,000 and will apply to the expansion.
‘It pays to be large’
As with other expansions, Rice has carefully considered how large the school should be, Leebron said.
“It’s nice to be small, but it pays to be large. You have to deal with tradeoffs,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, a computing engineering professor at Rice.
Vardi said Rice’s selective history — this year, its acceptance rate was 9.3 percent — has been beneficial to the prestige of the institution but not for the betterment of the country or the increasing number of students who want to attend Rice.
“We should give students a chance for education,” Vardi said. “Part of the question is, how do we balance with the quality of education that Rice likes to give?”
Vardi said hiring 50 more people to the 712 full-time faculty would be a costly initiative that would only increase professorship positions by about 7 percent. Meanwhile, the student population would increase by at least 20 percent, likely offsetting the current 6-to-1 faculty-to-student ratio and making class sizes larger.
Still, more students would mean more financial cushion for the institution, especially considering that those new students will become alumni who might give generous donations, Vardi said.
In addition to the campus and enrollment expansions, Rice also announced its first undergraduate major in business, which will be offered this fall, and will grow its online presence, starting with two online-only master’s degrees.
Additional programs will come within the next two years.