For some freshmen, “fitting in” at Duke will require some physical maneuvering.
Due to a record number of incoming students, some members of the Class of 2014 will have smaller living spaces and additional roommates. With roughly 40 more freshmen moving into East Campus than last year, about two dozen rooms were adjusted over the summer to accommodate an additional person, said Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta.
“We were done [with admissions] but kids kept on making funny decisions,” said Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag. “We’re going to end up with a class of about 1,745 to 1,750 students. Our yield is going to be a shade under 42 percent.”
The University received a record 26,694 applications this year—an 11.6 percent increase from last year. The 42 percent rate at which students accepted offers of admission marks a half percent increase from the yield of the Class of 2013, Guttentag said.
Guttentag attributed the higher number of freshmen to a combination of three factors: wait-listed students took longer to respond to an offer of admission, a higher percentage of wait-listed students chose to attend Duke and fewer students than expected decided to drop their plans to enroll over the summer after previously committing to Duke.
Guttentag said the percentage of wait-listed students that accepted the University's offers for admission was 10 percent higher than last year and that the timing of those acceptances ultimately had an effect on the class's size. Normally, a student responds to an offer of admission within two weeks of being accepted from the waitlist, and by the third week it is assumed that a student will not enroll in the University. This year, however, Guttentag said many students enrolled within three to four weeks of being admitted.
“What happens of course is that as you admit students from the waiting list, you can’t wait until you hear from every last person to decide whether you want to admit some more students,” Guttentag said. “That means that you have to make some predictions about how many students you’ve admitted from the waiting list will enroll.”
Although it was rumored that common rooms would be converted into dorm rooms, Moneta quickly dispelled this, adding that “nothing that draconian” would occur.
“We are able to accommodate basically across the board by taking the most appropriate spaces and making the conversions where we needed to,” he said.
On the academic side, to accommodate the larger class administrators added more sections for popular classes and new advisors, said Lee Baker, dean of academic affairs of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Because each freshman is required to take Writing 20, Baker said the University added four new sections of the course over the summer.
“We’re really trying to encourage people on a [course] waitlist to take classes with lower enrollment,” Baker said. “We’re asking students to be creative and take classes they may not otherwise. There’s plenty of capacity, we have a lot of under enrollment... but for those [courses] that are popular, we’re adding more sections.”
Baker said class size will largely be unaffected by the higher number of freshmen, adding that the directors of undergraduate studies manage these kind of issues well.
“The Class of 2014 is going to make a tremendous contribution to Duke University… even though it’s a little larger than we had planned,” Baker said. “Every single student is going to have an impact here. Hopefully it’s a blessing in disguise and the people in doubles and triples won’t be too grumpy about it.”
This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that wait-listed students offered admission accepted Duke's offer at a rate 10 percent greater than last year. The original story incorrectly stated that the University had offered ten percent more students from the waitlist.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.