The Graduate School is in the process of wooing applicants pulled from the largest applicant pool in its history.
The school's 51 programs that offer master's or doctoral degrees attracted 7,855 applicants for the 2003-04 academic year, which administrators noted was about a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Again, international applications outnumbered U.S. applicants overall.
"This has been an unbelievable year for applications," said Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School. "This year, we will have close to 8,000 graduate applications--the highest had previously been about 6,600."
Siegel said the Graduate School has seen a 50 percent increase in applications over the past two years, reversing a general trend toward dwindling applications from the mid-1990s through the beginning of this decade.
For the second year in a row, international applicants outnumbered domestic applicants. Fifty-three percent of applicants came from outside the United States, and international students dominate many of the applicant pools in the natural sciences.
Bertie Belvin, associate dean of the Graduate School for enrollment services, said the ever-increasing spike in international applicants is one reason applications are so much higher overall.
"We certainly have had a significant international application pool," Belvin said. "That has been the case for several years. Also in terms of U.S. applications, some of that is attributable to the economic situation. Typically, when there's a downturn in the economy, there's an upturn in graduate and professional school applications."
Belvin and Siegel both anticipated that the enlarged applicant pool has resulted in greater selectivity across the departments.
"Faculty are going to see a lot of very good applicants and won't be able to take them all," Siegel said.
Currently, the Graduate School is in the third of a three-year budget cycle. As such, some departments--including history and sociology--have less funds to take on as many students as they might have liked because they accepted a few more in the previous two years.
Overall, 6,900 people applied to the school's doctoral programs and 925 to its master's programs.
Perhaps the most striking statistic is that the nascent doctoral program in bioinformatics and genome technology, which kicked off last year under the penumbra of the genomics initiative, attracted 128 applicants--one more than the biology program itself.
"That's a pretty good applicant pool from a brand-new program," Belvin said. "That tells us there's a real interest in that particular field. It shows that having that program established at Duke was a really smart move."
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