Kiplinger ratings, Duke giving report highlight how far the university has come (and still has to go) in financial aid

Walking through the West Campus quad this past weekend on the way to the Duke-Wake Forest football game, I was struck to notice for the first time the detail work constructed on the east-facing side of the West Union building, one of the original buildings of the university's Depression-era construction boom that turned a sleepy Southern college into a nascent national powerhouse.

And while many look to Terry Sanford's days as the time when Duke truly rose in national reputation, the design of the West Union complex leaves no doubt of the intentions and goals of those who funded and implemented the transformation.

Look up next time you go by, and you'll see the shields of other universities; from Yale's arms to those of a smattering of other schools -- comprising, as Duke's indefatigable yet anonymous Library Answer Person notes, "institutions with significant similarities to Duke’s association, purpose, and ideal."

Inspiring, forward-thinking, hubristic. Think of it what you will, there's no doubt that Duke's founders saw themselves as emulating this club of academic predecessors.

These days, with a national and international reputation for teaching, research and medicine, Duke's place near the top of the world's university rankings is clear. And the school lodged a modest feather in its cap recently, ranking sixth on Kiplinger's list of best private university bargains.

In doing so, Duke finds itself amidst many of the same institutions it chiseled into stone seventy-odd years ago. But there's an important difference between Duke and most of its peers: the average level of debt taken on at graduation.

Closing that gap has been one of the most significant efforts of the university's fundraising goals for several years -- and the ultimate closure of ranks between Duke and its Stanford-MIT-H/Y/P colleagues promises to be crucial not only for the university's future, but for Durham's as well.

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Comparing Duke's performance on the Kiplinger's analysis to its competitive and aspirational peers, Duke falls squarely in the middle of the pack on everything from percentage of high SAT scorers, to four- and five-year graduation rates, to total annual cost to attend, to student-faculty ratios.

Every category, that is, except the average debt of graduates: (click for larger version)

Out of the 25 top-ranked private colleges by Kiplinger, only Wake Forest, the University of Chicago and Notre Dame exceed Duke's average student debt level at graduation. (Washington Univ. of St. Louis is omitted since it lacked a response to this datapoint.)

And while Duke is just barely behind a number of the other top 25 schools -- but, importantly, is well behind most of its top-ten peers, who generally have half or less of the average student debt of Duke graduates.

Of course, it's not like Duke is sitting still where student debt and financial aid are concerned. While it got overshadowed by the hockey-like-sport-on-grass conflagration a few years back, Duke's financial aid initiative was one of the signature efforts of then-new Duke president Richard Brodhead's tenure in the Allen Building.

Coincidentally, upon coming home from the football game, I found waiting for me in the mail a copy of the "Giving to Duke" 2008-09 annual report, detailing sources and uses of charitable giving to the university this past year.

In fact, it comprises the second paragraph of Brodhead's letter to donors -- ahead even of the receipt of gifts necessary to spring the Sanford School of Public Policy forth from the womb of its onetime mothership in Arts & Sciences:

In December of 2008, it was my pleasure to announce to a crowd of energetic students the successful completion of Duke's Financial Aid Initiative. New financial aid endowments created through this four-year effort helped us enhance need-based financial aid packages for undergraduates at the start of the 2008-09 year, and will continue to provide support for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in the future.

The total take: $308 million raised over four years.

And that helped to allow, as of December 2007, the elimination of loans for students with family incomes less than $40,000 and their reduction for families earning more than that, along with ending parental contributions in households with incomes less than $60,000.

Of course, Kiplinger's data relies on Peterson's college data -- which, we would assume, would start to change once the impact of some of these financial aid improvements kick in.

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On a personal level, I'm thrilled to see the increased financial aid opportunities, for reasons covered better in this December 2007 BCR post that's worth revisting if you're interested.

So what does all this have to do with Durham?

To the extent a pressure-point exists between town and gown where the Blue Devils are concerned, it usually -- in national media and assumptions perhaps more than reality -- comes down to the inherent disparity between an socioeconomically diverse home city and a relatively wealthy campus hosted within it.

Removing barriers to access -- such as the average indebtedness a student walks away from school with -- can only help to change the economic diversity of the student population. (So too can emphasizing a culture where service to society is expected, as Duke's been doing with the DukeEngage program.)

Duke students get what I think is an unjust level of criticism over the tantrums of a very few, but I suspect the dis-ease that what's likely a wider set of undergraduates feels with Durham is caused in no small part by the contrast between their typically above-average affluence and Durham's decidedly unusual economic perch.

I say "unusual" because Durham defies easy comparison with other cities. Liberal annexation laws and plain good sense have led to Durham growing as a city rather than becoming a small, poorer core city with nearby 'burbs, as in the case in places like Orlando and Columbia, S.C.

At the same time, the city has both more economic opportunity and growth than many American cities while retaining higher poverty levels than exclusive, upper-middle-class-only haunts like those in places like Forsyth County and Cary.

I suspect it's jarring to a student who's spent their whole life on Long Island in Sugar Land or Orange County, California to come to a city that doesn't look like, well, the kind of economically stratified community from which they come.

Bringing in more students from more places like Durham, on the other hand, is the surest way to ease those tensions.

Increased financial aid doesn't change the research mission of a university, or its commitment to its neighboring city, or the quality of the health care it provides.

But it does change the equality of access the university provides to all of its prospective students, allowing a wider range of students than ever before to matriculate.

And that, in turn, promises to be transformative.

Comments

[eah919]

Interesting- but it seems the conclusion that lower-debt-at graduation rates is directly correlated to levels of financial aid may not necessarily be true, depending on how the data was contructed. For instance, say, Princeton has a much larger percentage of kids with rich parents who foot the bill entirely and take on no debt. Or, say, Caltech has a higher-than-normal proportion of graduate students to undergraduates, students who (in some departments) teach and do research, and get tuition waivers and assistantships to help foot the bill. Thus, unless all these myriad demographic and institutional-makeup factors are corrected for, it seems like a stretch to relate debt to financial aid dollars. (To illustrate the point anecdotally, I went to low-cost public universities for two different graduate degrees: one where I got a tuition waiver and assistantship (and had zero debt), and one for a professional degree that had no such help available (and acquired significant debt... way more than any 'average' on this list!)

[Howard Lander]

One thing to consider: Duke still has financially blind admissions, unlike most if not all of the other schools on the list. So it may be that other schools admit more people that don't need loans.

[Emma Lee]

[Complete and total aside] you mention Yale - most people don't realize that Brodhead is the fourth Duke president to have graduated from Yale and that Duke and the school have a lot of ties (the least of which is that "Duke Blue" was originally "Yale Blue" ;)). Trinity College's first "modern president," John Franklin Crowell, was a Yalie, as was Douglas Knight and Nan Keohane got her doctorate there. Perhaps equally surprising to many people is that Duke has never had an alumnus/alumna president (Marquis Lafayette Wood, 1829-1893, was president of Trinity College at one point but obviously died before it became Duke). Instead our presidents have come from up and down the Eastern Seaboard (in addition to Yale, they are/were graduates of Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Naval Academy, UNC-Chapel Hill [!!!!], Wellesley).

I think most of us would like to just forget that Sanford went to UNC, rewrite history, and make him a Duke alumnus instead ;D [/Complete and total aside]

On to a relevant comment:

Re: your suggestion about Duke enrolling local Durham students -- I think the university works especially hard to recruit in Durham and enroll local students to the degree that it is possible. I remember there were statistics released at some point one year about what % of Duke students actually grew up in Durham . . . . . I will try to track that down. When I was a student in the early/mid 00's I personally knew of about 10 Duke students who grew up in Durham - of course this is just an anecdote and the school has 6000 undergrads. . . . But my point is that Durham students do have a presence on campus.

[Rob Gillespie]

I may be drawing the conversation in a different direction, but one of the worst effects of the disconnect between where many Duke students grow up and Durham is the student body's perception of crime in Durham. In the editorial pages of the Chronicle, there is at least a weekly mention of Durham being a "dangerous place" or a remark about how crime seems to target Duke students. Every time an editorial materializes about housing, Safe Rides, or volunteerism, the centerpiece of the argument is Durham's crime problem. This is only amplified when Duke blast emails all students, staff, and faculty after a student is mugged or otherwise involved in a crime. I also hear it on the Duke buses each day, when students talk about which parts of town they are afraid to go to-- essentially anything more than 3 blocks away from East Campus.

Duke has been doing a lot to get their students out into Durham, including Duke Engage and the new tickets program at The Hub. I just wish the students had more context when they talked about crime. Having lived in a few cities, I know that when Duke students say "Durham has a lot of crime", they really mean that "Durham has more crime than Woodside, CA". If only there was a way to re-enforce this with the students. Yes, Durham is a city, and like most cities, crime happens. It shouldn't be a reason to avoid seeing the city and meeting its residents, however.