The mission of the School of Continuing Studies (SCS) is to meet the educational needs of the wider community in a way that articulates the quality and standards of Rice University. Established in 1967, Continuing Studies offers more than 250 continuing education courses annually in liberal arts, sciences, fine arts, cultural studies, current affairs, languages, information technology, and personal and career development. Many courses each year are cosponsored by cultural institutions and community organizations. The School enrolls approximately 10,000 each year.

SCS offers the largest selection of noncredit humanities courses of any college or university in Texas. Its language program is one of the largest in the state, enrolling approximately 2,200 in 1999-2000. The Foreign Language Program offers courses in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Students from 41 countries have enrolled in the English as a Second Language Program.

The Rice Technology Education Center, begun in 1997, offers advanced computer training for those entering the information technology field or advancing their IT careers.

Continuing Studies also offers several programs of regional and national stature, including a professional development program for human resource management professionals, one of the largest in the nation. The Rice University Summer Advanced Placement Institute for teachers of Advanced Placement courses is one of the largest in the Southwest.

In addition to its noncredit offerings, SCS administers Rice's for-credit Summer School, which enrolls approximately 250 undergraduate students in about 30 courses annually.

Humanities students at Rice choose from eleven academic departments, including philosophy, art and art history, religious studies, language and literature departments, and history. The English department is particularly strong in medieval, Victorian, and modern literature, while the History Department's strengths lie in the history of the American south and modern intellectual history. These two departments publish Studies in English Literature and The Journal of Southern History. Students in religious studies and philosophy can work with Texas Medical Center professionals in the field of biomedical ethics. The language departments at Rice are among the nation's leaders in the teaching of languages, and offer upper level literature and culture courses as well. The study of the humanities at Rice helps students develop critical thinking, self-expression, and analytical skills.

Faculty in the School of Humanities are excellent teachers. They win a substantial number of teaching awards each year, and include among them the Carnegie National Professor of the Year and the Carnegie Texas Professor of the Year. Almost every faculty member is a publishing scholar and many of them have won national research fellowships from such organizations as the Guggenheim foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and so forth.

The Jones School is at the forefront of business education. While many business schools continue to emphasize theory, Rice is one of only two that require students to take their classroom knowledge into a real business setting, developing crucial leadership and managerial skills. In the Jones School's Action Learning Project, completed toward the end of the first year, student teams consult full-time with a company to solve a specific problem. The required second-year entrepreneurship course-one of the few required courses of its kind in the nation-and numerous experiential-learning-based electives provide additional opportunities for students to put their knowledge to work.

In every course, students have an unparalleled opportunity to work one-on-one with an accessible, involved, and energetic faculty. The faculty maintains an important balance between teaching and research, believing that current industry knowledge is as critical as textbooks. All of the school's instructors are either academics with significant business or consulting experience, or business executives with significant classroom experience who teach specialized elective courses. Faculty members are recognized as leaders in their fields and in teaching-Ed Williams was named one of the nation's two best entrepreneurial instructors by Business Week. Business Week also ranks Rice among the ten schools - including Stanford, Berkeley and Chicago - best able to balance real-world professionals and traditional faculty.

Demonstrating the high quality of their education, Rice MBA graduates are much sought-after. In the January 2000 Financial Times "World's Best Business Schools," Rice was in a six-way tie for first for grads employed at three months-100%-with Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Kellogg, and Michigan. Rice MBA grads' total compensation offers (averaging well over $100,000) consistently put the school among the top 20. According to the Financial Times, Rice ranks 4th among all private American business schools on "value for money," and based on average "salary today" (adjusted for salary variation between industry sectors for graduates of the Class of 1996), 13th.

Among the top ten percent of American business schools, the Jones School offers the MBA degree, the MBA for Executives degree, and joint MBA/ME and MBA/MD degrees. Rice University Executive Education offers a full schedule of noncredit executive education and customized courses for business and industry.