Rice University, formally William Marsh Rice University, traces its legal origins to 1891, when the Houston merchant and landowner William Marsh Rice chartered an endowed institute to be funded by his estate after his death. Its opening was delayed by more than two decades. Rice was murdered in 1900 as part of a scheme to substitute a forged will, and the ensuing criminal case and disputes over the estate had to be settled before building could begin. Teaching finally started on 23 September 1912, when the William M. Rice Institute enrolled a first class of 59 students. The institution took its present name in 1960.

Undergraduate life is organised around a residential college system introduced in 1957 and modelled on English collegiate universities. Each undergraduate is assigned to one of eleven colleges, with a twelfth due to open in 2026, and keeps that affiliation for the whole degree. Academic work is divided among eight schools spanning architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences. Enrolment is small by the standards of American research universities: about 8,880 students in autumn 2024, roughly 4,776 undergraduates and 4,104 postgraduates, taught by some 855 full-time faculty. Admission is highly selective, with a reported acceptance rate near eight percent.

Research intensity is high relative to that enrolment. The university carries the Carnegie R1 classification for very high research activity and has belonged to the Association of American Universities since 1985. Its campus occupies roughly 300 acres in central Houston, next to the Texas Medical Center, and the BioScience Research Collaborative was built to host joint work with that complex. Nanoscale science is a sustained strength, concentrated in the institute named after Nobel laureate and Rice professor Richard Smalley. Space science is another long-running thread: the university helped transfer the land on which NASA established its Houston spaceflight centre in 1962, and the Rice Space Institute has worked with that centre for decades.