About Duke's Undergraduate Instruction
The Undergraduate College and School
Undergraduate students in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and the Pratt School of Engineering take advantage of the rich resources available across the schools and institutes that make Duke such a distinguished research university. Undergraduates learn, engage, and connect with committed professors and mentors whose innovative research is recognized around the world. Trinity and Pratt students interact with these faculty members not only in the classroom and the laboratory, but in a variety of settings, both formal and informal. This gives students the opportunity to exchange ideas with professors, graduate students, and broader communities.
Duke students are empowered to learn, expected to change, and encouraged to lead. A Duke education is based on the understanding that students grow intellectually and personally through successive experiences that are often transformative. Duke provides undergraduates with rewarding learning experiences during which they generate, evaluate, integrate, and apply knowledge; develop fluency across cultures; learn to value diversity and difference; and become active and ethical agents of change in their communities and in the world.
One of Duke’s core values is applying knowledge in the service of society. With the schools of the arts and sciences, environment, engineering, and public policy each offering undergraduate instruction, students can approach real-world problems from different fields of inquiry. Duke also offers many service and learning opportunities such as Global Education, DukeEngage, student organizations, and research opportunities that involve students directly with the many major challenges confronting society.
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Trinity is Duke’s liberal arts college. Steeped in academic tradition and infused with a sense of dynamic engagement, the college embraces the enduring philosophy of teaching and learning that empowers students with a broad base of knowledge and a strong sense of values and ethics. The college enhances the liberal arts tradition with robust opportunities to participate in independent research as well as civic and global engagement.
Trinity College provides students with the opportunity to connect directly with the scholarship of Duke’s faculty. Faculty mentors guide undergraduates in their research, much of it at the cutting edge of scholarship in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. In fact, undergraduates are integral to the production of knowledge as well as artistic productions.
Trinity students learn to communicate persuasively, bring meaning to information, discern competing claims, and develop a capacity for reasoning, analysis, and empathy. Students join academic conversations grounded in values of integrity, freedom of inquiry and expression, respect for diversity and difference, and reliance on reason and evidence.
Trinity College’s 700+ faculty members teach in thirty-eight departments and programs. Many teach and collaborate across traditional disciplinary boundaries, which create distinctive interdisciplinary opportunities for students to learn without limits. The innovative course of study Trinity College students pursue encourages inquiry in and outside the classroom, laboratory, and studio. Global education, service learning, internships, and research opportunities complement classroom instruction to infuse students with the excitement of discovery and the opportunity to use knowledge in the service of society.
Pratt School of Engineering
The undergraduate engineering program at Duke University is designed both for students who intend to become professional engineers and for those who desire a modern, general education based on the problems and the promises of a technological society. The environment in which students are educated is as important in shaping their future as their classroom experiences. In the Pratt School of Engineering this environment has two major components: one is modern technology derived from the research and design activities of faculty and students in the school; the other is the liberal arts environment of the total university, with its humanitarian, social, and scientific emphases.
Engineering is not a homogeneous discipline; it requires many special talents. Some faculty members in the Pratt School of Engineering are designers; they are goal-oriented, concerned with teaching students how to solve problems, how to synthesize relevant information and ideas, and apply them in a creative, feasible design. Other engineering faculty members function more typically as scientists; they are method-oriented, using the techniques of their discipline in their teaching and research to investigate various natural and artificial phenomena.
History
Duke University was created in 1924 by James Buchanan Duke as a memorial to his father, Washington Duke. The Dukes, a Durham family that built a worldwide financial empire in the manufacture of tobacco products and developed electricity production in the Carolinas, had long been interested in Trinity College. Trinity traced its roots to 1838 in nearby Randolph County when local Methodist and Quaker communities opened Union Institute. That school, whose name changed to Trinity College, moved to Durham in 1892, where Benjamin Newton Duke served as a primary benefactor and link with the Duke family until his death in 1929.
Women entered Trinity College as regular students in 1892, and Washington Duke’s gift to the school’s endowment in 1896 required that it would treat women "on an equal footing with men" by creating an on-campus residence for them. In December 1924, the provisions of indenture by Benjamin’s brother, James B. Duke, created the family philanthropic foundation, The Duke Endowment, which provided for the expansion of Trinity College into Duke University. Duke maintains a historic affiliation with the United Methodist Church.
As a result of the Duke gift, Trinity underwent both physical and academic expansion. The original Durham campus became known as East Campus when it was rebuilt in stately Georgian architecture. The Philadelphia architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele, the firm’s chief designer in the 1920s, played a central role in the creation of East and West Campuses. West Campus, Gothic in style and dominated by the soaring 210-foot tower of Duke Chapel, opened in 1930. East Campus served as the home of the Woman’s College of Duke University until 1972, when the men’s and women’s undergraduate colleges merged. In 1963, the first five Black undergraduates enrolled at Duke. In 1995, East Campus became the home for all first-year students. In 2016, the main quad on West was named after Abele, an African American architect whose contributions were not widely known on campus until the mid-1980s.
Engineering courses were first taught intermittently starting in 1882. Engineering became a permanent department in 1910, an undergraduate College of Engineering in 1939, and a School of Engineering in 1966 after the addition of graduate courses. The school was renamed the Edmund T. Pratt Jr. School of Engineering in 1999. Academic expansion of the university throughout its history has included the establishment of other graduate and professional schools, as well. The first divinity degree was awarded in 1927, the first PhD in 1928, and the first MD in 1932. The School of Law, founded in 1904, was reorganized in 1930. The following year, the undergraduate School of Nursing was established, transforming in 1985 to a graduate school. The School of Forestry, which was founded in 1938, became the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1974 and was renamed the Nicholas School of the Environment in 1995. The business school was established in 1969 and renamed The Fuqua School of Business in 1980. In 2009, the Sanford School of Public Policy became Duke University’s tenth school. All undergraduates now enroll in either the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences or the Pratt School of Engineering.
Today, Duke is a global leader. It consists of a community of learners from around the nation and world, including more than 6,700 undergraduates and 10,000 graduate and professional students. Students come from diverse geographic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The Class of 2027, with only 6 percent acceptance rate, is composed of 13 percent international students and 55 percent female students. Self-reported race and ethnicity numbers for the class show 13 percent identify as Black, 35 percent as Asian, 13 percent as Latino, 1 percent as Indigenous, 53 percent as White; 5% elected not to report race or ethnicity. Figures add up to more than 100 percent because 7% of students identified as more than one race or ethnicity. Also, more than 50 percent of undergraduate students receive some form of financial aid, which includes need-based aid, athletic aid, and merit aid. About 12 percent are "first-generation" or the first in their family who will graduate from a four-year university. Approximately 17% were eligible for Pell grants.
About half of Duke undergraduates study abroad, many in Duke-run programs. The Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore was established in 2005 as a strategic collaboration between Duke University and NUS. In 2014, Duke partnered with Wuhan University in China to open Duke Kunshan University, with the goal of creating a world-class liberal arts and research university. In 2018, Duke Kunshan fully launched its four-year undergraduate degree program. In recent years, DKU classes have been drawn from 25+ countries, including a strong representation from China and the United States.
QuadEx: Duke's Residential Model
QuadEx is an inclusive living and learning model that builds upon the history, values and spirit of Duke to enhance and integrate the social, residential, and intellectual lives of undergraduates. QuadEx structures and resources work together to strengthen on-campus communities, enable deeper exploration of intellectual interests, and support student wellbeing and growth. Visit quadex.duke.edu for more information.