Some of the nation's brightest students have chosen Harvard over a full-tuition scholarship to Duke.
Eleven of the 22 incoming freshmen who were offered the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship this year opted not to accept. Of those 11 students, at least six will be attending Harvard in the fall.
The scholarship program, which offers recipients full tuition for eight semesters as well as a paid summer study-abroad program at Oxford, normally enjoys a 75 percent acceptance rate.
"It's been very disappointing," said Tom Robisheaux, the program's director. "I really don't have an explanation." Robisheaux said it would be too difficult to interpret the results with such a small number of students.
Despite this, Robisheaux said it was not surprising that a number of students decided to attend Harvard. "The prestige of Harvard is difficult to compete with," he said. "There is the perception among students that Harvard offers a more stimulating intellectual environment."
Christoph Guttentag, director of undergraduate admissions, also said that there is a myth associated with a Harvard education that is not easy to challenge elsewhere. "It is very difficult for students and their families to turn down Harvard," he said.
Many of the students who chose to attend other universities cited intellectual climate as a primary reason. Michael King, a graduate of St. Mark's School of Texas, decided to attend Yale after visiting the campus and falling in love with it. "I felt right at home in the intellectual climate there," he said.
Others simply got offers they couldn't refuse. Nila Alsheik, a graduate of Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, listed Duke as her first choice until she was accepted into Brown University's seven-year medical school program. "It's hard to get into medical school these days and this is a very prestigious program," she said.
The University traditionally offers the scholarships to approximately 20 students who have been selected by a scholarship committee. The committee is responsible for reviewing the top 200 applications submitted by the admissions office. Each application is then read by three different members of the committee and compared to a specific set of academic criteria.
The list is then narrowed to about 45 finalists who are invited to visit the University during the spring semester and meet with current A.B. Duke students, faculty members and administrators.
Following individual interviews, the committee offers the scholarship to finalists.
"We are looking for those students who have the greatest potential for high academic achievement," Robisheaux said. But, he said, this does not necessarily mean that these students have scored the highest on their standardized tests. "Good test-takers aren't necessarily good risk-takers. A.B. Duke students are leaders."
Guttentag said that although the acceptance rate has gone down this year, he is not overly concerned. "The sample of students we are dealing with is so small," he said. "If two or three students change their minds it changes the percentage significantly."
"We will probably ask ourselves if we could have done anything differently," he said, but added that it was important to remember that the University is competing with some of the best colleges in the country for these students.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the other colleges and universities to which this year's scholarship winners were also accepted.
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