It really comes down to what you want: would you prefer a big city like NYC with lots of students in the college or a not so busy city like Houston with significantly fewer students.
The "amount of students" thing is important because at NYU, you're probably going to end up with like 100-200 people in your lecture hall but at Rice, you might only have like 30 people in a classroom.
In terms of education, I know Rice has a very good art history program but NYU probably has a good one too. The education you're going to get is going to be relatively the same, it all comes down to location and size of student body. Oh and you're probably going to pay an extra ten thousand a year to go to NYU, not including the cost of living in New York City as opposed to Houston (just throwing that out there).
