<p>wow calm down, people pick colleges for tons of arbitrary and emotional reasons and character assassination is not really warranted. pennpenn hasn't said anything controversial on this thread and nurjahan is entitled to share his reasons for picking UVA (misguided as he is, lol)</p>
<p>Woah...people who apply to Duke also apply to Chicago? Social opposites if you ask me. People say Chicago is "intellectual" whereas Duke is "pre-professional" so I wouldn't think they have many shared apps, though I forgot that prestige is prestige and kids applying to one top school might as well apply to a bunch.</p>
<p>i m not really misguided, lol- you might want to ask that yourself b4nnd20</p>
<p>what a presumptuous comment thoughtprocess. i visited duke extensively and you obviously haven't...because i found a ton of the intellectualism and social quirkiness that you believe is absent there. I don't see why UChicago and Duke can't be on the same, well-thought-out, realistic college list. in fact, on CC you will find many threads where people were choosing between UChicago and Duke (i found those very helpful during my decision process. my choice was certainly not unique. and for your information not a single ivy was among my choices.)</p>
<p>I didn't think that Duke was very intellectually grounded either until I visited campus during BDD and heard about FOCUS and the modes of inquiry/areas of knowledge emphasis. There's no reason I think that Duke and Chicago can't both belong on one's college list because they both share many academic similarities although most Duke students seem to follow the pre-professional route while Chicago students seem best equipped to deal with higher academia.</p>
<p>Oh and Pennpenn, I think both Duke and Stanford far far surpass UChicago with regards to the overall undergraduate experience. You really can't find a better combination of academics, prestige, school spirit, athletics, weather, social atmosphere, campus beauty, etc. than among these two universities anywhere else in the country.</p>
<p>nurjahan: Hopefully you learn how to detect sarcasm better at UVA..</p>
<p>Duke over Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Univ. of Michigan, ASU, and Stanford.</p>
<p>"what a presumptuous comment thoughtprocess. i visited duke extensively and you obviously haven't...because i found a ton of the intellectualism and social quirkiness that you believe is absent there."</p>
<p>B4nD, I actually go to Duke. I think my several semesters of attending Duke and loving every minute of it outdoes your 'extensive visits' lol. Sorry for the misunderstanding. </p>
<p>If you'd look at my last 3000 posts or so you'd see that I was on CC myself as an HS senior. I said I wanted a fun school with the smart kids possible. The list most people suggested included Dartmouth, Duke, Penn, Brown and Cornell - which I all got into with varying fin. aid. When wondering about Chicago, people constantly told me it was a quiet place, filled with anti-social students who weren't as academically strong as the ones at Duke or Dartmouth. Thats not entirely accurate either, but thats just what I was told. </p>
<p>I agree Duke has a ton of intellectualism.
However, the perception on this board is that Chicago has lots of intellectualism and Duke doesn't - in my opinion, I think Duke students/undergrad is superior to Chicago's and has as much intellectualism to boot. Its just that on this board, people assume Duke students are big party-goers and ones at Chicago are anti-social - which is a contrast based on opinion, not reality.</p>
<p>btw, I think intellectualism is overrated and is just a nice way of saying "nerdy, none-partying, anti-social" when used as a way of justifying a lackluster social scene.</p>
<p>What's the final class size of Duke 2011? Did they end up with more students than originally planned?</p>
<p>1700~ when the target is around 1650</p>
<p>Duke overenrolls every other year, guess they overestimated how many kids wouldn't come because of the LAX problem</p>
<p>Isn't the purpose of using the waitlist (which Duke did this year) so you don't overestimate?</p>
<p>The yield of those off the waitlist must be surprisingly high.</p>
<p>Wow.. great observation, Sam Lee... wow! I'm impressed! People who stay on a school's waitlist would actually consider going to it once accepted... WOW!!!</p>
<p>But the main fact is that Duke over-enrolled and had the lowest acceptance rate in history.. </p>
<p>Prediction: Duke's acceptance rate will drop to 15% for Class of 2013 after overenrolling by 50 kids for Class of 2012 due to an underestimation of yield..</p>
<p>I don't know what you were getting. My speculation (not observation) was based on the fact they did admit people off the waitlist. It's unusual to have high yield from those off the waitlist. But then it's also unusual that a school ended up over-enrolling that many after opening the waitlist.
If you can think of a better explanation, please bring it.</p>
<p>Well, one note - Columbia breaks apart its admissions between College and Engineering when it releases info. If Duke did that, it would help show yields between the different colleges and would provide more valuable info in my opinion. I think Trinity's % rate is 16-17 and Pratt's 28-29%, and the yield for Pratt is lower as well. Which means thats what the University should focus on (and is focusing on, if you've been on campus lately...I wish Econ and Polisci had sweet science centers...)</p>
<p>Does anyone know what the average GPA for an accepted student at Duke is? I checked the Duke site, but they had no answer.</p>
<p>"It's unusual to have high yield from those off the waitlist."</p>
<p>Naw, it's expected to be high. But you're right, it looks like Duke underestimated just HOW high.</p>
<p>Haha.. I know what you're talking about, Sam Lee, I'm just joshing with you a little bit! :p Duke probably did got a decent amount of people enrolling from the waitlist..</p>
<p>However.. if you look at the yield Guttentag predicted.. he was planning to accept at least 100 off the waitlist since the end of March.</p>
<p>The extra 1% of yield though could be that Duke accepted 150, expecting 100 to enroll.. but got 125 instead..and that could very well be the case! I agree with you on that!</p>