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

Outreach

Finally, we recognized both the opportunity and the responsibility to expand and enhance our outreach programs.

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.

Until the 1990s, Rice’s only significant outreach effort was our very successful School of Continuing Studies, founded in 1968. Still going strong, the School of Continuing Studies is now one of the largest and most productive in the state, receiving strong support and participation from alumni, friends, and thousands of others for whom education has not stopped with a degree. The regular continuing studies curriculum has been enhanced by Alumni College, which we began at the urging of Elizabeth Gillis in 1994. This program also has mounted continuing education classes for alumni in cities far from Houston.

But we have, in fact, gone far beyond continuing studies in terms of outreach during the last decade. It would be a sad irony if children—today’s “deserving young people of slender means” who live 10 minutes from this campus—could not view Rice as a place that might one day offer something to them. We, therefore, have placed special emphasis on improving public education K–12 in the region. Rice now has 62 outreach programs, mostly K–12 teacher and student programs in Harris Country and the Rio Grande Valley.

Next Section: What remains to be done?