Selling Duke

Generally speaking, I’m not someone whose mood changes with the season. Unless, of course, we happen to be talking about college acceptance season, which is the one month of the year when the graduating seniors from my high school alma mater find me to be the most annoying.

You see, I’m not from Virginia or North Carolina or New Jersey. I didn’t go to a high school with students whose lifelong dream was to be a Blue Devil. I went to an all-male, Catholic high school in San Diego, where ‘TJ’ didn’t stand for Thomas Jefferson High School, but rather Tijuana, the Mexican city located less than 20 miles south of our seven-acre campus. And even though California is the most represented state in the Class of 2015, you wouldn’t know it by looking at my alma mater.

When I chose to come to Duke two years ago, I was the first person from my school to earn acceptance to the university in over five years, and the first to attend in well over ten years. And we’re talking about a school that regularly sends its graduates to the best colleges in the country. The sad fact of the matter is, unless you’re talking about college basketball, the students at my high school don’t think twice about Duke.

Naturally, that means it’s my responsibility to tell each and every worthy applicant from my school why I chose Duke over the other “higher-ranked” colleges. First, I have to face the uphill battle of convincing them to even apply to some school in Durham, N.C. You can’t even imagine how many blank stares I’ve seen while explaining Duke’s geographic location. To a teenager from “America’s Finest City,” I might as well be telling them it’s in Bumf***, Nowhere. Then, once I’ve convinced a handful of them that applying is even worth the $75 fee, I have to sway the admitted students into coming here and rejecting offers from Cornell, Stanford, Harvard and Yale. I tell them about the great social scene (I might still living in the past with that one), the pride of Duke athletics and our unique array of respected academic programs. Despite my best efforts, I’ve had approximately a 0 percent success rate so far.

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Especially since Duke doesn’t seem to be doing enough of it.

For a school that was once tied with Yale for third place in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, our name recognition among students outside of the East Coast is borderline dismal. Every time I talk to a student who chose to apply to Northwestern, Georgetown or NYU instead of even considering Duke, I feel like I’m going insane. And when the director of college counseling from my high school tells me that the regional admissions officer from Duke denied her request to visit the campus and talk to prospective students (like every other school in the U.S. News top 10 does on a yearly basis), I feel like giving up.

Clearly, the admissions department at Duke does understand, at least to some degree, that name recognition is important. Last year, while being asked about the rise in applicants from California, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag wrote, “as we have attracted more students from the West Coast and from overseas, that alone tends to generate greater visibility and further interest in those parts of the world.” I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment, but just because our visibility as a top-tier academic institution has increased, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still vast room for improvement. Until every student in America considers Duke to be synonymous with its fellow mainstays at the top of the rankings, more work needs to be done.

At a time when millions of dollars are being spent to build campuses overseas in an attempt to increase international visibility for the University, the same effort should be put into augmenting our reputation at home. We cannot expect to improve as an academic institution if we aren’t winning our fair share of the best students from every corner of the United States.