How does Notre Dame compare to Rice in admissions difficulty?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that both Notre Dame and Rice are extremely selective, but they draw somewhat different applicant pools and are hard in slightly different ways. Notre Dame has a larger national applicant base, very strong brand recognition, and a lot of applicants who are specifically drawn to its Catholic identity, school spirit, and undergraduate focus. Rice is smaller, which means fewer seats overall, and its applicant pool tends to be especially strong academically, particularly among students interested in STEM, research, and a close-knit residential college system.

In broad terms, I would put them in a very similar tier of admissions difficulty. Neither is meaningfully “easy,” and for most applicants the difference is not large enough that it should drive your whole college list by itself. A student who is competitive for one is often at least plausibly competitive for the other, though the exact profile that feels most natural can differ.

Notre Dame can sometimes feel a bit more unpredictable because it attracts applicants from many different backgrounds and has a distinctive campus culture that matters in the review process. Rice can feel especially tough because its class is small and it often appeals to high-achieving applicants with very polished academic records. In other words, Notre Dame’s selectivity is shaped heavily by broad demand and institutional fit, while Rice’s is shaped heavily by tiny scale and a very strong applicant pool.

If your question is simply which is harder to get into, I would treat them as near-peers rather than assuming one is clearly more attainable. The better reason to prioritize one over the other is whether you actually prefer Notre Dame’s tradition-heavy, spirited, Midwest campus culture or Rice’s smaller, residential, research-oriented environment in Houston.