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Duke is about 2/3 the size of Penn and noticeably smaller. In terms of undergraduates, it is on par with nearly all of the other elite private universities in size (including Emory and WUStL, also on the OP’s list). Walking around campus, you’ll bump into at least a half dozen people you know before you get to wherever it is you’re going. </p>
<p>Trinity only has ~4000 kids, and surprisingly Duke has smaller class sizes than smaller universities like Rice. 71% of classes have fewer than 20 students, and a mere 5% of classes have more than 50 students (fewer than any top 75 university except Yeshiva, Fordham, Wake Forest, Pepperdine, and Chicago).</p>
<p>Furthermore, one of my majors was Classics (one of the OP’s interests), and my classes were tiny. Undergraduates were outnumbered by faculty, in fact. My other major, Earth & Ocean Sciences, was similarly small.</p>
<p>Duke certainly feels large in a physical sense, however. It has an extremely large, sprawling campus that I loved; others may not.</p>
<p>(With respect to schrizto’s post, I can assure you that nobody dresses up for football games at Duke. Most people dress down, in fact. Tailgating and football games are extremely casual affairs, to say the least.)</p>