VOLUME 102, ISSUE NO. 1 | STUDENT-RUN SINCE 1916 | RICETHRESHER.ORG | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2017
2017 FOOTBALL PREVIEW AND PREDICTIONS see pages 19-21 SPOTLIGHT
welcoming the class of
2021
The matriculating class of 2018 is the largest in Rice history.
FLYING IN 5% 20%
8%
A DIVERSE A DIVERSE CLASS*
Out of 1,048 incoming students, 111 are international and 601 are from out of state
HALF AND HALF 32%
CLASS
51% of the incoming class identify as male 49% of the incoming class identify as female
33% African-American/Black Multiracial Hispanic/Latino/Mexican-American Caucasian/White Asian American *2% American Indian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, or not reported. Demographics do not include 111 international students (11% of the incoming class).
SMART OWLS Caucasian/White
The middle 50% of admitted students scored between a 1480 and a 1570 on the SAT** or between a 33 and 35 on the ACT **1600 scale; exclusive of the Writing section infographic by christina tan
NEWS
High yield causes bed shortages EMILY ABDOW NEWS EDITOR / ESA2@RICE.EDU
Rice did not find beds for all its new students until the start of Orientation Week due to a higher than expected yield rate for 2018 matriculants, according to Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson. “Rice only has one guarantee in its housing agreement, which is that if you’re a new student and you want housing you are guaranteed housing,” McDonald said. “There is no guarantee for three years on campus.” Housing and Dining offered returning students a discount of $2,000 off of the $4,745 fall semester room costs on June 16, according to Housing and Dining Senior Business Director David McDonald. However, when bed shortages persisted, Housing and Dining increased the overcrowding incentive to free housing for the fall semester. This offer led to about 40 students choosing to overcrowd, making 17 additional beds available by Aug. 14. McMurtry College sophomore
Marco Gutierrez said he and his roommate agreed to overcrowd under the $2,000 incentive and tried to find three doubles to consolidate into two triples. However, they could not find a third double, even after the incentive increased to free housing.
Students who could have gone to Stanford or Princeton or Harvard or Yale chose to come to Rice. John Hutchinson Dean of Undergraduates “I started Facebook messaging almost every male at McMurtry to try to find a candidate,” Gutierrez said. “I must have messaged 50 people before finally I found [someone].” Rice admits more applicants than there are available beds on campus with the expectation that
many will decline the offer of admission. The ideal size for every new class is 955 and the target for enrolled students over the course of the year is 3,800, Hutchinson said. Of the 2,865 freshman applicants whom Rice accepted this year, 1,048 enrolled at Rice, resulting in a yield rate of 36.6 percent, 1.3 percent higher than the year before. In contrast, Rice also extended 2,865 offers for freshmen entering in fall 2015, but only 969 students accepted the offer, a yield of 33.8 percent. The transfer yield rate also increased from 50 percent to 56 percent, but the number of transfers enrolled fell by six as Rice extended fewer offers of admission to transfer students, according to data provided by Director of Admission David Warner. The Office of Admission could not be reached for a comment regarding the data at the time of print. Residential colleges conduct room draw while returning students are still on campus, well before admissions receives data
on enrolled new students. This leaves Housing and Dining to estimate the numbers of beds that each college should reserve for new students. In previous years, inaccurate estimations led to too many students being bumped, while this year colleges bumped too few. “In my opinion, room draw occurs very early and sometimes makes predicting beds to save difficult,” McDonald said. “For most universities, it’s housing that is running the room draw so they can do it as early or as late as they want, but here it’s unique and it’s Rice and we like it that way.” Hutchinson said he asked the residential colleges to freeze their waitlists for living on campus over the summer after learning of the large incoming class. The freeze came after a much larger number of students were forced to move off campus for this academic year. At McMurtry College, one of the two largest residential colleges with 314 beds, the wait list currently stands at 20, according to
YIELD CONT. ON PAGE 6
Purity Test evolves, spreads EMILY ABDOW NEWS EDITOR / ESA2@RICE.EDU
Have you ever done anything that you wouldn’t tell your mother? Lose 10 purity points. Ever told a lie? Ever cursed? Don’t recognize these questions from the Rice Purity Test? That’s probably because you weren’t alive when the Thresher published the original version of the test in 1924. Back in 1924, the average score for the 119 women who took the test was 62. Of the scores collected on DisOrientation 2017, the Saturday after Orientation Week, the Houston average for people who took the test was 65. The number of tests taken in Houston spiked to 274 on Dis-O, from around 100 on a typical day. In just the past year the webpage of the “official” online version of the test, hosted by the Thresher, has been visited 1,524,204 times. The top city for purity test takers: Atlanta, followed by Houston, Dallas, Chicago and New York. As the test spreads through colleges and high schools across the globe, inspiring chat rooms, blog posts and even an erotic book — “Bicurious and the Rice Purity Test” by Amy Morrel — it serves as an entryway into often taboo topics even as it is being phased out of the place where its current iteration was designed to be taken: Orientation Week. BEYOND RICE When Madeline Cook first heard of the test at St. Agnes Academy, a private all-girls’ Catholic School in Houston, her friend told her one of the smartest girls in their grade had gotten a 19. “I was like, ‘What the heck what test would she get a 19 on?’ and then I pulled it up and I was like, ‘Oh this is not what I was expecting,’” Cook, now a sophomore at Drexel University, said. Cook said that being at an allgirls’ school made it a lot easier to share scores. “It would have been really awkward to be like, ‘Oh yeah I heard this person got like a 15 if there were a bunch of boys around because then they would have been like, ‘Wow, that girl is a slut,’” Cook said. While most girls wanted to have scores in the middle range, Cook said going to a Catholic school made higher scores less embarrassing. After sharing scores, girls often delved into the details. “If you were friends you would talk about the details or it would all come out later in a game of ‘Never Have I Ever’ because you now had new targeting information,” Cook said.
PURITY CONT. ON PAGE 10