Taking Stock

They say money isn't everything.

But sometimes, at Duke, that can be hard to believe. With a multi-billion-dollar endowment, million-dollar buildings and an undergraduate degree that rings in with a six-figure price tag, the University itself seems fixated on the money trail.

It may seem inevitable, then, that young alums end up shuttled into the financial sector, into tailored suits on Wall Street and equally weighty paychecks. Matt takes on the heady world of investment banking this month, offering last rites for the students ready to dive into 100-hour workweeks and sleepless months.

But not everyone ends up in corporate America-in fact, most don't. Teach for America, the non-profit organization which places recent college grads in low-performing schools around the country, hired more Duke students last year than any other employer. And year after year it attracts more job applicants on campus than any other organization.

One thing's for certain: almost everything-and everyone-has a price tag. It's hard to see where Duke goes wrong in spending dough on new facilities like the Bostock Library, which Dan Englander reviews this month, or the new Central Campus, which Sarah Kwak investigates. Duke has raised a pretty penny from alumni and endowment investments, as Andrew Gerst and Iza Wojciechowska found out while counting out the University's cash drawer.

But is anything still sacred these days? Sarah Ball saw firsthand the way money can polarize a community when she visited the Eastern Band of the Cherokees' Qualla Boundary-site of a shiny new casino.

The abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher once noted, "He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has."

So where does that leave us?