Olde Hornet
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/07/magazine/duke-economic-diversity.html
During the spring and fall exam periods at Duke University, Perkins Library tends to be crowded. The library is near the center of campus, and it is a building both elegant and functional. Four stories high, it resembles part of a Gothic castle on the outside. Inside, Perkins is airy and technologically advanced. In the days leading up to end-of-semester exams, the library doubles as a study space and a social hub.
On the third floor, however, there is a room that usually has open seats. It is known as the Duke LIFE room, named for an organization that represents and serves undergraduates who come from low-income families or whose parents did not attend college. The Duke LIFE room is rarely crowded. “When every other desk in the library is taken, there is always space in that room,” Juliana Alfonso-DeSouza, a third-year student from San Antonio and the first member of her family to attend college, told me. “It is fairly empty most of the time,” said Stephany Perez-Sanchez, another first-generation student from South Carolina.
In part, the room’s underuse seems to reflect a perceived stigma about the space, at least among younger students. The Duke LIFE room is next to a study area that is popular among fraternity and sorority members, and the room’s heavy door makes a beeping sound whenever a student uses a key card to open it. Entering the room can feel like a public declaration of a student’s modest background. While many first-generation students are proud of their status, not everybody wants to make such a declaration.
But there is also a larger explanation for the room’s underuse: Compared with other universities, Duke has not enrolled many low-income students. A recent academic study of 12 elite colleges — the eight in the Ivy League, as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — found that Duke gave some of the largest advantages in the admission process to students from families making at least $250,000 a year. Only about 12 percent of Duke students in recent years have received Pell Grants, the largest federal scholarship program, which is typically available to families in the lower half of the income distribution, earning $60,000 a year or less. By comparison, the Pell shares at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T. and Columbia have each recently hovered around 20 percent. Federal data suggests that Duke also has fewer middle-income students, coming from families that earn too much to qualify for Pell Grants but still less than $100,000 a year. The difference between Duke and its peers amounts to several hundred lower- and middle-income students who have been missing from its campus every year.
Why has Duke chosen this path? The university’s leaders insist that they have not chosen it — that they are deeply committed to ensuring that Duke is an engine of social mobility. “There is nothing more important to us than making this education, which has the potential to be completely transformational in the lives of our students, available as widely as possible,” Gary Bennett, the dean of Duke’s primary undergraduate college, told me. Duke’s failure to do so nonetheless makes it a case study of elite higher education’s conflicted attitude toward social class. No president or dean will argue that selective colleges should be dominated by rich students. Somehow, though, economic diversity waits in line behind other priorities — like the construction of gleaming new student centers, the rapid expansion in the number of university administrators, the admission of affluent children with various connections and the maintenance of dozens of sports teams, some of which attract few fans.
A case study in economic diversity at elite colleges. See the full list.
During the spring and fall exam periods at Duke University, Perkins Library tends to be crowded. The library is near the center of campus, and it is a building both elegant and functional. Four stories high, it resembles part of a Gothic castle on the outside. Inside, Perkins is airy and technologically advanced. In the days leading up to end-of-semester exams, the library doubles as a study space and a social hub.
On the third floor, however, there is a room that usually has open seats. It is known as the Duke LIFE room, named for an organization that represents and serves undergraduates who come from low-income families or whose parents did not attend college. The Duke LIFE room is rarely crowded. “When every other desk in the library is taken, there is always space in that room,” Juliana Alfonso-DeSouza, a third-year student from San Antonio and the first member of her family to attend college, told me. “It is fairly empty most of the time,” said Stephany Perez-Sanchez, another first-generation student from South Carolina.
In part, the room’s underuse seems to reflect a perceived stigma about the space, at least among younger students. The Duke LIFE room is next to a study area that is popular among fraternity and sorority members, and the room’s heavy door makes a beeping sound whenever a student uses a key card to open it. Entering the room can feel like a public declaration of a student’s modest background. While many first-generation students are proud of their status, not everybody wants to make such a declaration.
But there is also a larger explanation for the room’s underuse: Compared with other universities, Duke has not enrolled many low-income students. A recent academic study of 12 elite colleges — the eight in the Ivy League, as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — found that Duke gave some of the largest advantages in the admission process to students from families making at least $250,000 a year. Only about 12 percent of Duke students in recent years have received Pell Grants, the largest federal scholarship program, which is typically available to families in the lower half of the income distribution, earning $60,000 a year or less. By comparison, the Pell shares at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T. and Columbia have each recently hovered around 20 percent. Federal data suggests that Duke also has fewer middle-income students, coming from families that earn too much to qualify for Pell Grants but still less than $100,000 a year. The difference between Duke and its peers amounts to several hundred lower- and middle-income students who have been missing from its campus every year.
Among select elite schools, Duke enrolled a low share of freshmen who receive Pell Grants
Duke, in short, is one of the least economically diverse colleges in the United States. It is also one of the nation’s top-ranked universities, having been in the U.S. News & World Report Top 10 almost continuously since the ranking began in the 1980s. It has an endowment of about $12 billion, one of the 25 largest per student in the country. Duke’s alumni include Melinda French Gates, the philanthropist, and Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, as well as actors, chief executives and members of Congress. The university, which is in Durham, N.C., long ago left behind its history of racial segregation: More than 40 percent of its undergraduates are students of color, and about 10 percent come from overseas. But it has made less progress diversifying by social class.Why has Duke chosen this path? The university’s leaders insist that they have not chosen it — that they are deeply committed to ensuring that Duke is an engine of social mobility. “There is nothing more important to us than making this education, which has the potential to be completely transformational in the lives of our students, available as widely as possible,” Gary Bennett, the dean of Duke’s primary undergraduate college, told me. Duke’s failure to do so nonetheless makes it a case study of elite higher education’s conflicted attitude toward social class. No president or dean will argue that selective colleges should be dominated by rich students. Somehow, though, economic diversity waits in line behind other priorities — like the construction of gleaming new student centers, the rapid expansion in the number of university administrators, the admission of affluent children with various connections and the maintenance of dozens of sports teams, some of which attract few fans.
