RICE: Where Are We Now? Where Can We Go?

Faculty Assets

We recognized early on that, to satisfy our standards in teaching and research, we would have to expand the faculty in several important areas—not an easy task considering how fiercely our peer universities vie for the best faculty available. Yet over the past decade, we added 220 faculty positions overall, an increase of 39 percent.

Endowed chairs enable us to compete for the best faculty, and we presently have 156 such named chairs—70 of them established since 1993. In addition, we now boast one of the lowest student–faculty ratios of any university in the nation, at less than six-to-one. Our class sizes are very small, and we rely less on graduate students for teaching than any other research university.

RICE: Undergraduate Teaching