This is exactly right. Professors pay grad students/ post-docs slave labor wages. Also if you get a fellowship, the professor pays nothing at all.
As a "pure academic", I don't think of law school and med school first when I think of "grad school". So many people have gotten into law school that I don't think grades will be a problem if your entrance exams are OK, but maybe someone else can verify. The real problem is med school. For this, it might be good to go somewhere that you know you can make your A's. Curious to know other people's experiences: do low undergraduate grades always haunt you for the rest of your life? Has anyone never been able to get past that, no matter what they did the rest of their life, just because they were 19 years old and got overwhelmed with stuff in their classes and personal life at one time? This was fairly true of Rice ten years ago when I started there. Of course, since I'm a moderately conservative Republican and prefer to concentrate on my work rather than politics most of the time, I felt right at home. It's probably one of the reasons I went there. Of course, that was me; that may not be you. Rice is getting more liberal and politically active these days, if the controversy over the football coach is any indication, so... well, it should make some people happy.
I would not say for the rest of your life. Once you have experience working, your GPA is a bit irrelevant as compared to your job references. I did get asked for my Rice transcript when I was 36 , but that was after I had been offered a job. In this case, the transcript was more of a formality than anything else. Of course if I had not actually graduated from Rice ... Graduate school is another story. The top grad school programs have many more applicants than openings. They have to base their student selection decisions on something, with GPAs being at the top of the list. Thus, a Rice grad with great work experience, competitive GRE/LSAT/MCAT scores, and a 3.0 GPA may have a tough time getting into Harvard Law, Medical or Business School.
Glynch, it's definitely changing. The Rice student body is still largely apathetic, but there are more students around with pet causes, some of whom care to make a fuss about them once in awhile. This is good or bad, depending on how you look at it, and I'm sympathetic to both sides. However, Rice is still pretty inner-focused in terms of its relation with the larger Houston community. I don't know how old it is, but there's a phrase used by students, staff called "beyond the hedges," referring to the plantlife that marks most of Rice's perimeter. It's been remarked that it's very common for on-campus students at Rice to rarely venture "beyond the hedges" except to eat out. I think this is due to the college system, the academic environment, and the amount of participation in college activities. When you've got a community, and you spend a good amount of time with academics (or pretending to), and you're involved in other oncampus things as well, there just isn't much time to do significant things off-campus. This also is both good and bad (mostly bad in my opinion,) but understandable. Isabel, what church did you attend when you were a student? One thing I enjoyed about Rice was the wealth of churches downtown and around Houston.
