🚀 go-pugleaf

In SD 15.600, Brad Porter writes:
]I tend to feel it's the univerity's standards that are lower,
]not those of the public schools.  If the professors at Purdue have this
]low of an opinion of the students, I'm going to have to reconsider Purdue
]as a possible school for me.

The problems nowadays are twofold (in my opinion):  the talent is there, 
but the "best and brightest" are going for the gold (i.e. law, etc) rather 
than science/engineering; and, yes, the preparation may be inadequate (and/
or) the counselors don't encourage their students to pursue a technical 
career.  On the other hand, we at Rice have never had any trouble filling 
our undergrad SE slots with extremely talented students (we have a 10/1
ratio of applicants to slots), so we get the very best.  In graduate school
the problem is a little different: here the problem is the perception that
faculty and research jobs are very tight and so why torture yourself with
years of grad school?  Again, we at Rice have been fortunate to have very
strong graduates who have generally not had major difficulty landing very
good jobs.  Recognizing the tightness of the funding recently, we have cut
back on the number of grad students we admit each year. 

Bottom line:  we'd love to have you come to Rice, but you'd better be good
to make the cut! We'll work you hard, but you'll end up with a degree
that's worth something. 

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