education policy scholar Lois Rice (née Dickson), who helped design the federal Pell Grant subsidy system and who joined the Brookings Institution in 1992; and Emmett J. Rice (1919–2011), a Cornell University economics professor and the second black governor of the Federal Reserve System. Her maternal grandparents were Jamaican immigrants to Portland, Maine; her paternal grandparents were the descendants of enslaved Africans and from South Carolina. Her parents divorced when Rice was ten years of age. In 1978, her mother married Alfred Bradley Fitt, an attorney, who at the time was general counsel of the U. S. Congressional Budget Office. Rice said that her parents taught her to "never use race as an excuse or advantage," and as a young girl she "dreamed of becoming the first U.S. senator from the District of Columbia". Rice was a three-letter varsity athlete, student government president, and valedictorian at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., a private girls' day school. She attended Stanford University, where she won a Truman Scholarship and graduated with a BA with honors in history in 1986. She was also awarded a National Merit Scholarship and elected Phi Beta Kappa her junior year. Rice attended New College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where she earned Master of Philosophy (1988) and Doctor of Philosophy (1990) degrees, both in International Relations. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979–1980: Implications for International Peacekeeping. Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, honored her dissertation as the UK's most distinguished in international relations. During her time at Oxford, Rice was a member of the Oxford University Women's Basketball Team. Early career Rice served as a foreign policy aide to Michael Dukakis during his campaign in the 1988 presidential election. She was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, from 1990 to early 1992. Rice worked in McKinsey's Toronto office. Clinton administration (1993–2001) Rice served in the Clinton administration in various capacities: at the National Security Council (NSC) from 1993 to 1997 (as director for international organizations and peacekeeping from 1993 to 1995, and as special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs from 1995 to 1997); and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997 to 2001. Rice's tenure saw significant changes in U.S.-Africa policy, including the passage of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, support for democratic transitions in