Financial Considerations

Colleges and Universities A-Z Duke University
1

Hi all! Congratulations to those who were accepted. You guys have worked extremely hard to get to this point and deserve to enjoy this moment.

Unfortunately, I know this is also the time where you have a lot of options and a lot of questions. Duke’s price tag is tough to swallow, and “Is it worth it?” is a question that runs through everyone’s mind. I don’t want this initial post to get too long, but I will try to answer specific questions if you guys have them. And as a disclaimer, I’m picking examples on opposite sides of the spectrum to get the point across, but in no way am I looking down on certain fields (go liberal arts!)

So… is Duke worth it? And of course the answer is it depends.

The Duke name will open many doors - it is a feeder school to Wall Street, lots of kids end up working in start-ups in Silicon Valley or other tech hubs around the country, and many will go on to get even more advanced degrees. We’ve all heard this, how exactly does that translate over the next 4 years?

  1. Duke’s goal (relative to other schools) is not just to help you get a job
    I can’t speak to the experience at other institutions, and most of my impressions have been formed via word-of-mouth from friends at schools. Duke’s curriculum, whether you’re in Pratt or Trinity, focuses heavily on broad, transferrable skills. You will not become an accountant after graduating from Duke. You will have majored in economics and become very skilled at thinking/solving/working through problems related to the field. Engineering at Duke tends to be much more theoretical than at other schools; they are training the next generation of thinkers and problem solvers, not necessarily arming students with specific skills to get a specific jobs. And it’s true, your peers at Duke will one day have jobs that don’t even exist now (that’s the whole entrepreneurship/if it doesn’t exist, go and make it mentality Duke encourages). You’ll get to meet leaders in every field at Duke, and the academic environment, the networking, the human resources - that’s what you’re paying for.

Now, if your goal is I want to go to college and get a nice job as a chemical engineer or an accountant or marketing, there are other programs out there with more direct paths towards that goal, at a much more affordable price tag. If you aren’t exactly sure if what you want to do yet, ignore this point and continue reading below.

  1. Tuition is the same for everyone
    Every student takes anywhere from 4-6 courses every semester and pays the same tuition. However, consider the English/History/[Insert humanities] major who will mostly be reading and writing vs the STEM majors who might be using very expensive machines and equipments.

  2. Return-on-investment
    Consider the amount of debt you’re taking on versus the average salary of your dream job. If your dream job is working in public education, think about how long it may take to pay off the debt. If your dream job is to be an investment banker, the amount of debt you might consider taking on will look different.

  3. Advanced degrees
    You’re considering law school, business school, graduate school, medical school. All of those things cost more money and for the most part, students take out even more loans then. Minimize undergraduate debt if you plan on going this route. For example, medical schools don’t really care where you went to undergrad, they care that you were successful there. Yes, they may briefly consider you went to Duke and may have faced considerable challenges there, but no, being successful at Duke is really where having that name will help you while not doing well at Duke might/will hurt you.

  4. The intangibles - endless opportunities
    There are very few things in college that we can put an accurate price on. What’s the value of being surrounded and pushed to grow by other brilliant people? What’s the value of building relationships with world-renown professors? What’s the value of the ease of access to research opportunities? Think about funding for a DukeEngage trip, which I think might average close to $10,000 per student, but the experience in itself is priceless. At the end of the day, I really believe that the value of a Duke experience is the personal growth. That’s really not something that can be measured easily. Critical thinking skills, compassion, the ability to communicate effectively, other soft life skills - difficult to say if that’s worth $70K a year. But look at the what the students at Duke go on to do and try to see if something resonates with you - consider the Truman scholars, the Rhodes scholars, the Fulbright fellows, the Nobel Prize winners. This place cultivated those people; do you want that for yourself?

The financial burdens are very real. If you’ve been accepted into Duke, you’re probably the type of person who could succeed anywhere. Duke is amazing and I will forever sing praises about my experience there, but I do recognize that it’s not the be-all-end-all and this is a difficult decision. Please let me know if there are anything else I can help with.

2

This was a really enlightening post, and confirmed what I just started thinking about my college education. I’m deciding between Duke, $60,000 a year with my paltry financial aid package, and a full ride + more to University of South Carolina Honors College. The latter has produced Rhodes Scholars, Truman fellows, and Fulbrights, but obviously lacks the name-recognition and immediate prestige, while Duke would require me to take out approximately $50,000 in loans a year. I had to think really hard about the type of college experience I want, and what I want to do after college: I know that I want to go to grad school, and will probably wind up working in some form or another for the government or perhaps as a consultant (neither of which are set in stone). I want to travel and research extensively and have a shot at the Rhodes, which might not necessarily be possible when I’m competing with every one of my peers at Duke. Will I have “Duke” on my sweatshirt and the 6.4% acceptance rate as a testament to my intelligence? No. Will I have more opportunities somewhere else, both financial and otherwise? Yes.
If you can afford Duke and you love it, go for it! You probably won’t regret it. If you’re iffy about Duke, and have other, lesser-ranked options, consider those, as you may have more opportunities to thrive and be on top. If Duke will put you into significant debt (over $60,000, I’d say), start looking at the other options I’m sure you have. There’s hundreds of articles and studies that support what I’m saying, and thousands of people with concurring opinions on CC and other forums like this.

3

TY for post. For me it’s looking like with my decent FA and parents helping some, I’ll only be taking a small loan. How much can I expect to make from internships/jobs over the summers?

4

It depends on what field you go into. As a bio major who did summer internships in research labs, stipends can range from 3000-5000-ish for the 8-10 weeks of work. If you get an internship at say FB, you could be looking at 7-8K/month for those summer months + possible job offer after graduation. I think a lot of internships will fall in between research labs and FB.

There’s an expected summer student contribution in the financial aid package, but those are waived for summers when you’re on DukeEngage for example because you clearly can’t do that and work.

Beware that your summer earnings can count as income that will impact aid packages in the future, so it has the potential to not be helpful at all financially (the professional development/experience of course is very important).

5

@mecsquared Thank you for the post.

Can you please help me decide between Duke and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for my Masters in Data Science in Fall 2018:

Here are the key differences between both the programs:

  1. Duke will be having the inaugural class in Fall 2018. We would be entering into a completely new course at Duke University (www.datascience.duke.edu). On the other hand, UIUC has a pretty established program.
  2. Duke offers more flexibility and variety of courses, along with a capstone project in second year of Masters. The UIUC program is a little stringent one and doesn’t include a capstone project.
  3. UIUC is costing around $55000 for two years, whereas Duke would cost $94300 for two years.
  4. Class size at Duke would be 30-35 students, and at UIUC it would be 65-70 students.

So my main query is : Is it worth giving extra $40000 to Duke? Is the brand difference between Duke and UIUC worth this much amount?