Goodby Rice University

My kid who has straight As, a 1530 SAT, speaks two languages fluently, plays sports, and did summer internships in Japan and Ukraine was rejected from my alma mater Rice University.  Worse than that, it was also my mother’s alma mater.  My mother was one of only 100 women at the whole university when she attended in the late 1950s, and was the first in her family ever to attend college. She was a major reason I attended Rice for both a bachelors and an MBA, and this rejection was a spit in both of our faces.  It shows the admissions office is divorced from Rice’s own history and driving their own agenda.

This along with the college bribery scandal shows college admissions is irreparably broken.  Kids who shouldn’t get in are admitted.  Kids who should be admitted are not, in this case probably due to an anti-legacy effort, or because my daughter is not “diverse” enough.  I have no doubt at all she would have been accepted if the ethnicity box were checked differently. She is an honor student, and I was not some alum hoping for “legacy” to dump my C-student onto my old school.

Over the years I have gotten fellow alumni jobs.  Not job leads, but jobs.  Students often reached out to me over LinkedIn for internship leads since I am one of very few alumni working in Silicon Valley.  In the early 2000s I did a marketing project for a group of professors who were trying to spin out a technology.  A few years earlier I had connected my father’s company to hire a Rice professor for a consulting project.  

Despite over 50 years of family connection and my staying involved, Rice decided to cut ties with me while at the same time letting in dozens of foreign students with no ties at all, and who will all drop all ties to Rice once they return home.

Rice has a frighteningly small number of alumni – they graduate in ten years what or Texas A&M or UCLA does in two years – and should be nurturing their network, not alienating it. But like the foreign students will do once they are out, I will now be cutting all ties with Rice.  No job leads.  No internship leads.  Applications or resumes listing Rice go to the bottom of the pile.  Students can’t find me on LinkedIn since Rice is deleted from my profile. My own networking efforts will not be hindered since there are so few Rice alumni in my field.  I was a pathfinder. 

And after all, why would I help a university that wouldn’t accept me as a student if I were applying today?