Rice University has moved up one spot to No. 16 nationally in the latest U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, earning top 10 recognition for best value, undergraduate teaching and learning communities.
Rice ranks No. 8 in the Best Value Schools and Undergraduate Teaching Programs categories, and rose eight spots to No. 9 for Learning Communities, the university said.
The rankings arrive alongside a series of other Rice announcements. The university will launch a Master of Artificial Intelligence program in the fall of 2027, aimed at preparing students with computer science backgrounds for careers building and deploying AI systems. The 30-credit-hour, nonthesis professional degree will be offered by the Department of Computer Science and will begin accepting applications this year.
Provost Amy Dittmar, Harris Eyre, executive director of the Global Brain Economy Initiative, and Simon Fischer-Baum, director of the brain and society initiative at the Rice Brain Institute, are joining Brain Week at the United Nations General Assembly. The Rice delegation will explore how brain health, human capability and emerging technologies such as AI are shaping the future of economies and communities worldwide.
On campus, academic leaders, department chairs and researchers from across Texas gathered Sept. 18 to launch the Texas Materials Consortium, a new statewide collaboration aimed at strengthening materials research, sharing advanced research infrastructure and pursuing large-scale funding opportunities.
In research news, a Rice-led study found that a type of transformation best known for hardening steel and enabling shape-memory alloys may also occur in a much softer class of materials. A separate Rice-led study found a simple way to eliminate a subtle directional bias that can interfere with magnetic particle assembly: rotating a magnetic field slightly more than one full turn before reversing it. Biosciences expert Natasha Kirienko also developed a new screening method identifying drugs that target leukemia cells without unduly harming healthy cells.
Rice juniors Jesse Romero and Lily Harvey spent the summer uncovering a largely undocumented chapter of the university's history: Latinx students were enrolling at Rice and graduating as early as the 1920s, decades before the university's first Black graduate.
Andrew Billing, who has served as Rice's interim deputy secretary to the Board of Trustees since 2025, will become secretary to the Rice Corp. and Board of Trustees on Oct. 1.