New initiatve seeks to enhance Rice education
Rice University is launching a three-year volunteer and fundraising effort called the Owl Edge: Initiative for Students that will aim to enhance Rice’s student experience, according to the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. The initiative will debut during Homecoming weekend and will seek to provide an educational edge for students through the funding of three specific goals.
The first goal involves raising student scholarship aid through new endowments, according to President David Leebron.
“We have an increasingly diverse student body, which is resulting in greater demand for scholarships,” Leebron said. “The cost of funding these scholarships is becoming more challenging.”
Leebron said another goal of the initiative is strengthening the Rice educational experience.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is fund more opportunities for students, whether it’s research, travel, internships or mentoring programs,” Leebron said. “We will also be enhancing the Center for Teaching Excellence and creating a new entrepreneurship track within the business minor.”
According to Leebron, the third aspect is related to helping students achieve lives of impact both while they are here and beyond.
“[The third aspect] involves providing more professional development opportunities for students and developing entrepreneurship programs like OwlSpark,” Leebron said.
Leebron said the initiative reflects a time in Rice’s history during which there must not only be a continuation of volunteer and fundraising efforts done in the past, but also the introduction of new campaigns.
“For me, there are two big pillars of this campaign,” Leebron said. “How do we make sure that, having admitted the most remarkable students that we can find, this education is possible for them and how do we make sure the education is as good as it can be, in terms of a full range of opportunities that we can offer?”
According to Darrow Zeidenstein, the vice president for Development and Alumni Relations, the initiative will invite parents, alumni and friends to support the mission to educate and prepare students for leadership for the future. An explicit goal of the effort will also be to ask for contributions of time and effort.
“For a lot of people, giving their time is every bit as valuable as giving their money — for some of them it’s even more,” Zeidenstein said. “So asking them to make a difference in student’s lives by giving their time is something that we have to be very thoughtful about, and this initiative is meant to mobilize that effort.”
Leebron said the impact of the initiative will reach both incoming and current students.
“There will be ideas we will develop, pilot programs we can get started and opportunities that we will continue to enhance and sustain,” Leebron said. “We hope to acquire resources for the future but also impact students that are here already.”
Zeidenstein said success of the initiative will not be measured by a dollar goal but on what is achieved through the funding.
“At the end of three years, we want to be able to say that we’ve accomplished what we put forward in our three goals,” Zeidenstein said. “So this isn’t really a dollar-driven effort so much as a ‘get it done on the ground’ effort.”
According to Leebron, student involvement is encouraged for the initiative’s success.
“I think our students’ enthusiasm is actually the biggest driver of everything,” Leebron said. “My experience with Rice students has led me to realize they’re remarkably dedicated to making Rice better for the people following them — that they are very thoughtful and very generous when it comes to thinking about making Rice stronger for the next generation.”
Leebron said the initiative reflects both the concepts outlined in the Student Association’s Education of the Future initiative and the ideas of the administration regarding the improvement of the Rice experience.
“Those two things are remarkably aligned,” Leebron said. “Faculty, students, alumni and donors are all pretty much headed in the same direction — to make our education more impactful, in terms of giving people not just knowledge, but skills and ambition, and excitement. We want our students to arrive thinking they’re going to change the world, and we want them to leave thinking they can change the world.”
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