Princeton Review ranks Rice No. 1 for ‘best quality of life’

BY DAVID RUTH
Rice News staff

Rice University ranks No. 1 nationally for “best quality of life” in the newly released 2010 edition of Princeton Review’s popular guidebook “The Best 371 Colleges.”

Based on its survey of 122,000 students attending the 371 colleges in the book, Rice also ranked:

No. 8 for “happiest students”

No. 11 for “lots of race/class interaction”

No. 19 for “great financial aid”

Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s vice president for publishing and author of “The Best 371 Colleges,” said, “We commend Rice University for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book. We make our choices based on institutional data we gather about schools, feedback from students attending them, and input from our staff who visit hundreds of colleges a year. We also value the opinions and suggestions of our 23-member National College Counselor Advisory Board, and independent college counselors we hear from yearlong.”

The guide provides rankings for 62 categories and publishes the top 20 colleges in each category.

The rankings for quality of life are based on students’ assessment of food on- and off-campus, dorm comfort, campus beauty, ease of getting around campus, relationship with the local community, campus safety, the surrounding area, interaction between students, friendliness and happiness of the student body and smoothness with which the school is administered. Rice has consistently ranked in the top 10 of this category over the past several years.

In its 2010 profile of Rice, the Princeton Review quotes Rice students directly from their survey responses. Among them are some candid comments:

“Rice University is dedicated to its students, whether in the classroom through providing top-notch professors who are approachable … or just around campus by catering to students’ professed real needs and desires” by an administration that is “extremely sensitive to students’ needs and concerns.”

The residential college system “ensures a lot of mixing among different majors, races, interests and geographic origins. People are similar enough and smart enough and have enough converging interests to make good friends with each other.”

Rice’s residential system is “great because it gives you another family and allows you to get to know everyone in your college.”

Of the rankings, Rice President David Leebron said, ”We are a genuine community where every individual feels that they matter, and they do. This is also about the quality of our campus, and it’s about having a campus with all the trees and open, green space in the heart of a major city where students can enjoy the best of urban living. Mostly, though, Rice received that ranking from our students because they know that every student matters.”

Student Association President Patrick McAnaney said the honor reflects Rice’s commitment to the undergraduate experience.

”This recognition is a strong testament to Rice’s continued commitment to the undergraduate experience, from the residential colleges to our unique relationships with faculty and staff members,” he said. ”The diverse factors considered in this ranking show how well-rounded the Rice experience is — a trend I expect will continue for many years.”

To read Rice’s complete profile, visit www.princetonreview.com.