Why Does Duke Have So Few Low-Income Students?
A case study in economic diversity at elite colleges. See the full list.
Photo illustration by Ben Denzer
During the spring and fall exam periods at Duke University, Perkins Library tends to be crowded. The library is near the center of campus, and it is a building both elegant and functional. Four stories high, it resembles part of a Gothic castle on the outside. Inside, Perkins is airy and technologically advanced. In the days leading up to end-of-semester exams, the library doubles as a study space and a social hub.
On the third floor, however, there is a room that usually has open seats. It is known as the Duke LIFE room, named for an organization that represents and serves undergraduates who come from low-income families or whose parents did not attend college. The Duke LIFE room is rarely crowded. “When every other desk in the library is taken, there is always space in that room,” Juliana Alfonso-DeSouza, a third-year student from San Antonio and the first member of her family to attend college, told me. “It is fairly empty most of the time,” said Stephany Perez-Sanchez, another first-generation student from South Carolina.
In part, the room’s underuse seems to reflect a perceived stigma about the space, at least among younger students. The Duke LIFE room is next to a study area that is popular among fraternity and sorority members, and the room’s heavy door makes a beeping sound whenever a student uses a key card to open it. Entering the room can feel like a public declaration of a student’s modest background. While many first-generation students are proud of their status, not everybody wants to make such a declaration.
But there is also a larger explanation for the room’s underuse: Compared with other universities, Duke has not enrolled many low-income students. A recent academic study of 12 elite colleges — the eight in the Ivy League, as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — found that Duke gave some of the largest advantages in the admission process to students from families making at least $250,000 a year. Only about 12 percent of Duke students in recent years have received Pell Grants, the largest federal scholarship program, which is typically available to families in the lower half of the income distribution, earning $60,000 a year or less. By comparison, the Pell shares at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T. and Columbia have each recently hovered around 20 percent. Federal data suggests that Duke also has fewer middle-income students, coming from families that earn too much to qualify for Pell Grants but still less than $100,000 a year. The difference between Duke and its peers amounts to several hundred lower- and middle-income students who have been missing from its campus every year.
Among select elite schools, Duke enrolled a low share of freshmen who receive Pell Grants
Duke, in short, is one of the least economically diverse colleges in the United States. It is also one of the nation’s top-ranked universities, having been in the U.S. News & World Report Top 10 almost continuously since the ranking began in the 1980s. It has an endowment of about $12 billion, one of the 25 largest per student in the country. Duke’s alumni include Melinda French Gates, the philanthropist, and Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, as well as actors, chief executives and members of Congress. The university, which is in Durham, N.C., long ago left behind its history of racial segregation: More than 40 percent of its undergraduates are students of color, and about 10 percent come from overseas. But it has made less progress diversifying by social class.
Why has Duke chosen this path? The university’s leaders insist that they have not chosen it — that they are deeply committed to ensuring that Duke is an engine of social mobility. “There is nothing more important to us than making this education, which has the potential to be completely transformational in the lives of our students, available as widely as possible,” Gary Bennett, the dean of Duke’s primary undergraduate college, told me. Duke’s failure to do so nonetheless makes it a case study of elite higher education’s conflicted attitude toward social class. No president or dean will argue that selective colleges should be dominated by rich students. Somehow, though, economic diversity waits in line behind other priorities — like the construction of gleaming new student centers, the rapid expansion in the number of university administrators, the admission of affluent children with various connections and the maintenance of dozens of sports teams, some of which attract few fans.
Colleges in every region are enrolling fewer Pell Grant recipients
The California Institute of Technology and Notre Dame also stand out as colleges that have had very large endowments and low economic diversity (although officials at each school told me they were starting to increase their Pell shares). There are a few dozen others with smaller endowments per student but still enough money to enroll many more lower- and middle-income students than they do, including Bates, Brown, Bucknell, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Oberlin, Reed, Tufts, Tulane and Wake Forest. Each of these colleges, like Duke, has decided not to enroll many of the talented working-class students who are qualified to attend — and each would prefer not to call attention to this policy. Duke says it is working to rectify the situation and has shown some early signs of progress, with an increase in Pell Grant recipients among the first-year students who arrived on campus this August. Yet Duke remains a stark example of the ways in which elite higher education replicates privilege at least as much as it provides opportunity. “We absolutely have some work to do,” Bennett said, “but we’re committed to doing it.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling this summer banning race-based affirmative action has thrust economic diversity to the center of the debate over college admissions. For years, administrators at selective universities have focused on more visible forms of diversity — starting with gender, race and religion in the 1960s, followed by geography (both within the United States and globally) in recent decades. But the Supreme Court’s decision forbids colleges to use race itself as an admissions factor, raising fears among university leaders that the number of Black, Latino and Native American students will plummet. One way to continue enrolling racially diverse classes, given the country’s large racial gaps in income, wealth and neighborhood poverty, is to emphasize economic diversity in recruitment and admissions. Some colleges have signaled that they plan to pursue this strategy.
Crucially, class-based affirmative action remains legal. It is also popular with the American public, polls show. Race-based affirmative action is not. When it has appeared on the ballot in state referendums, it has lost almost every time over the past 30 years — most recently in 2020 in deep-blue California, by almost 15 percentage points. In our polarized country, increasing the economic diversity of elite colleges, by contrast, is a rare idea on which the political left, center and right agree.
But it still is not happening on most campuses. That’s the central conclusion from an analysis of enrollment data at almost 300 colleges that my colleagues and I conducted in collaboration with Ithaka S+R, a higher-education research group. We examined all of the country’s most-selective colleges, public and private, including every state flagship university. Together, these schools educate roughly 2.7 million undergraduates each year.
The data stretch back more than a decade, and the trends during that period are worrisome. We focused on Pell Grants, which college students in the bottom half of the income distribution generally receive. It is not a comprehensive measure of economic diversity, but it is the broadest one available, comparable across colleges. Other data show that colleges that enroll few Pell Grant recipients, like Duke, often enroll relatively few middle-class students above the Pell cutoff.
At most colleges in our analysis, the number of Pell recipients has fallen over the past decade. The decline in the share of students who are Pell Grant recipients has been especially notable at public universities. Many states deeply cut funding for higher education after the recession of 2007-9 and never fully restored it. Universities also spent heavily in recent years to construct new buildings and hire more administrators, a recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal documented. Together, these trends have led colleges to raise tuition and recruit higher-income students who can pay it. At the University of California, San Diego, the share of first-year students receiving Pell Grants plummeted from 47 percent in 2010-11 to 24 percent in 2020-21. There were declines as well at U.C.L.A, the University of South Dakota and the University of South Florida, among others. Most private universities have likewise become less economically diverse during this period, also partly for financial reasons.
The declining economic diversity of the country’s top colleges has broad consequences. These are the schools that have the most resources and the highest graduation rates. Attending one of them is typically an excellent investment. College graduates fare far better in modern America than people without a bachelor’s degree. They earn more money and are less likely to lose their jobs. They are healthier and happier on average. The gap in life expectancy between the two groups has widened in recent years. Some of these differences are causal, social-science research has suggested: College teaches people both hard and soft skills that are useful in today’s complex economy. All of which means that the recent enrollment trends contribute to rising inequality and diminished social mobility.
Change in freshman Pell Grant share for the 10 schools with the highest endowment per student
Still, there is one category of colleges where economic diversity has increased over the past decade, and it is somewhat surprising: At most of the 50 or so richest colleges — those with the largest endowments per student — the number of undergraduates from lower-income families has risen, sometimes substantially. At Harvard, the share of first-year students receiving Pell Grants rose to 22 percent in 2020-21, from 18 percent in 2010-11. At Princeton, the share rose to 18 percent, from 11 percent. These differences amount to several hundred students at each college. There were also significant increases at Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Northwestern, Pomona, Swarthmore, Vanderbilt and Yale.
This summer, an academic study — by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research group — received widespread attention for documenting the enormous admissions advantages that many of the same colleges confer on their most-affluent applicants. These applicants are more likely to come from private high schools, to be recruited athletes or to have parents who attended the college, all factors that provide a leg up in admissions. Partly as a result, elite campuses enroll hundreds of students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution (which starts at about $600,000 a year in income). Elite colleges remain far less economically diverse than many public colleges with fewer resources.
Schools with smaller endowments are enrolling fewer Pell recipients, while richer schools are enrolling more
Even so, most highly endowed colleges have increased their enrollment of lower- and middle-income students over the past decade. They have done so in response to criticism that they are bastions of privilege rather than engines of upward mobility. The colleges have hardly become pure meritocracies, but they do look more like America than they did a decade ago. And although they are small relative to the rest of higher education, they matter. They send a disproportionate share of their graduates into the nation’s leadership class, across government, business, science and media. One way to create a more diverse American elite is to diversify the training grounds of that elite.
Duke is a fascinating case study because it is an exception to the exception — and therefore symbolic of the larger problems in higher education. A decade ago, Duke’s level of economic diversity was fairly typical for an elite college. Recently, though, it has failed to keep pace with its closest peers. An earlier study by the Opportunity Insights researchers, based on data from the early 2010s, came to a shocking conclusion: Dozens of colleges, including Duke, enrolled more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom 60 percent. The same appears to be true of the most recent graduating classes at Duke.
Juliana Alfonso-DeSouza did not consider herself to be poor while she was growing up in San Antonio. She lived with her mother, a real estate broker, and they seemed to be doing fine. When Juliana was young, she would accompany her mother on her business appointments. They occasionally had financial problems, but Juliana’s attitude was: Who didn’t? “I’m obviously not wealthy, but my mom made both ends meet,” she said. The two of them lived together, with their dog, Khloe.
Only after Juliana began to do so well in high school that she realized she might become valedictorian did she begin to fathom attending a selective college far from home. She and her mother were basketball fans, partly because San Antonio’s only major-league sports team is the Spurs, and they often watched March Madness, the college basketball tournament, on television together. They didn’t root for Duke because Juliana considered the team to be another symbol of “white privilege,” she recently told me with a laugh. But she was familiar with the university.
For low- and middle income students, elite colleges can cost much less than advertised
Once she and her mother began attending college fairs in San Antonio and thinking seriously about where she might go, her attitude changed. Duke was a top academic school, she knew. It wasn’t too far from Texas. And it had a sports culture that Juliana liked, even if she would need to change her rooting loyalties. Duke students, she thought, seemed more well rounded than students on some other campuses. She also learned that Duke would probably be less expensive than the University of Texas, after taking financial aid into account. That is a common discovery for low- and middle-income students. Elite colleges have an intimidating total annual sticker price of about $80,000. In truth, need-based scholarships, financed partly by the colleges’ endowments, often reduce the price below that of a state school. Ultimately, Juliana received a full scholarship from Duke.
As she prepared to leave for college, she started to understand that most Duke students there would not be like her. She could see their affluence on social media and more signs after she arrived. Growing up, she had not known about Canada Goose, the expensive parka brand. At Duke, it seemed like a campus uniform during the colder months. “I never felt like I was the poor kid, and then you get to Duke, and you realize some of these kids have yachts and have mansions,” she said. “They are quite literally the top 1 percent. I think it was me being a little bit naïve.”
Other Duke students who identify as F.G.L.I. — for first-generation, low-income — tell similar stories. Money shapes life there, and on other elite campuses, in ways that affluent students barely recognize and that lower-income students must navigate: the costs of joining fraternities and sororities, eating at off-campus restaurants, joining friends for spring-break trips to Myrtle Beach or Cancún. As Stephany Perez-Sanchez said, “If you don’t have the funding from your parents, then you can’t do the activities that other students are doing.” Karen Dong, a Duke sophomore who grew up outside Dallas with parents who immigrated from China and do not speak English, said she noticed how many Duke students traveled to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in the middle of the semester. “I am really surprised by how many of my friends do not receive financial aid,” Dong told me. Anybody who does not need financial aid at Duke is in the top few percentage points of the U.S. income distribution.
Duke also maintains several policies that funnel university resources to affluent students. Some elite colleges, like those in the Ivy League, typically do not award so-called merit scholarships to high-income students; their financial-aid budgets pay for aid based on economic need. Duke spends millions of dollars on aid — like the A.B. Duke Scholarship, named for the son of an early-20th-century university benefactor — that has no connection to financial need. Some of these scholarships are used to attract wealthy students.
Several students and professors mentioned Duke’s dining program as a symbol of the university’s priorities. The food is uncommonly good for a college, ranked best in the nation several years ago by The Daily Meal, a food website. There is a sushi restaurant on campus, as well as an Irish pub, a raw-food restaurant and JB’s Roasts & Chops, which promises students that they will “experience meat and potatoes the way they’re supposed to be.” These meals are not cheap. “If you want to eat a proper lunch, it’s $10 or $15 at least,” Randi Jennings, a Duke senior from South Carolina, told me. Dong explained that students have invented a word — “wuflation,” based on the first two letters of West Union, the name many students use for the main dining hall — to describe the cost of campus food. Higher-income students often buy a deluxe meal plan or have their parents add to their account late in the semester. Lower-income students monitor their meal spending to keep from exhausting their account.
Still, I was struck during my conversations with Duke’s F.G.L.I. students by how matter-of-factly they described these challenges. The situation does not spring from any malicious intent, several suggested; it comes from ignorance, a lack of awareness. When other students or professors are alerted to the ways that the campus assumes affluence, they are willing to make changes. Duke LIFE, the support group for low-income students, provides subscriptions to online learning platforms, for instance.
Above all, F.G.L.I. students talk about the ways in which Duke is transforming their lives and potentially setting their whole family on a different trajectory. The data supports this view. At Duke — as well as elite colleges that admit more low-income students — their graduation rate tends to be similar to the overall graduation rate. “It has definitely changed my life and the lives of other first-generation low-income students I know,” Jennings said. Her mother worked for a family-owned car service business before she died when Randi was in middle school, and her father now drives for Uber. Jennings plans to apply to law school this year and is interested in doing appellate work. She is an avatar of the power of education.
Photo illustration by Ben Denzer
So is Alfonso-DeSouza. She has received a full scholarship, named for David M. Rubenstein, a billionaire investor, a member of the Duke class of 1970 and himself a first-generation college student. She is majoring in evolutionary anthropology and split this summer between doing biochemistry research in Durham and working in an emergency room in San Antonio. After college, she plans to become a doctor, perhaps a surgeon. Regardless, she wants to mentor younger people like her. “It’s definitely been life-changing on my end,” Alfonso-DeSouza said about Duke. “Colleges don’t get enough credit for how much impact they can have on people’s lives.”
Bennett, the Duke dean, told me a related story. Five years ago, on his first day in an administrative job helping oversee undergraduate education, he attended a dinner for families of lower-income students. When he was growing up, Bennett’s mother was a kindergarten teacher in the high-poverty schools of Camden, N.J., and his father was an administrator there, and the dinner reminded him why he went into education. For all the reasons to be cynical today, the United States was still an inspiring place when it lived up to its ideals of providing opportunity for all. At one point, a student’s father approached Bennett and said that her enrollment at Duke was the most important thing that had ever happened to their family. The father had tears in his eyes. His daughter, standing nearby, rolled her eyes, a response that Bennett found perfect. She was too busy forging her new life to be sentimental about it.
Why, then, has Duke fallen so far behind on economic diversity?
As Bennett and other university officials tell the story, it was an unfortunate accident. Over the past decade, as other elite colleges paid more attention to low-income students, they wooed some who once might have attended Duke. “This is an extremely competitive space,” Bennett said of the recruitment of F.G.L.I. students. In response, the university put in place new strategies last year to persuade more of them to choose Duke, through personal outreach from administrators, students and Duke parents. The approach is working, Bennett said. Duke’s initial count shows that the Pell share in the current first-year class jumped to 17 percent, from an average of 12.9 percent since 2010-11. If Duke can repeat that success, it will no longer be one of the country’s least economically diverse colleges.
But there are reasons to wonder whether the past year was a blip. The competition for lower-income students, after all, is likely to intensify again because of the Supreme Court decision. Perhaps the biggest reason for skepticism is Duke’s own justification of the trends over the past decade: that as rivals grabbed many talented poor and middle-class students, Duke could not find other such students to admit. The available data contradicts that story. An influential 2012 academic paper by two economists, Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, found that elite colleges were not enrolling many standout students from modest backgrounds. The subtitle of the paper was “The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students.” Colleges that have set out to become economically diverse have come to the same conclusion. Duke could have been admitting these students for years. Schools both above it and below it in the college rankings have done so.
When Washington University in St. Louis, known as Wash. U., decided to diversify its student body in the 2010s, some board members worried that it would need to lower its academic standards, according to Holden Thorp, who was then the provost and now oversees the Science journals. But the worry was misplaced. “There were plenty of low-income kids with high scores that we hadn’t been admitting,” Thorp told me. Ron Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins, made the same point to me. “They are there, and they do come,” Daniels said. About 20 percent of the last few entering classes at Hopkins have received Pell Grants, roughly double the level in 2010.
It is difficult to know exactly what would be the ideal level of economic diversity for elite colleges. They will probably never have 50 percent of their students coming from the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution. By almost any measure, more teenagers from the top half are qualified to attend these colleges and prepared to thrive academically. But Catharine Bond Hill, an economist who studied these issues before becoming president of Vassar College and who is now a managing director at Ithaka S+R, argues that at least 25 percent of the entering class at top colleges should be Pell recipients. As Thorp told me: “These top colleges all have the opportunity to enroll as many low-income kids with high scores as they want. There is probably a limit somewhere, but none of them are at it.”
Photo illustration by Ben Denzer
Of course, there still is a cost to admitting more middle-class and poor students. When colleges do so, they lose some of the tuition revenue that wealthy families can pay. The difference between the levels of economic diversity at Johns Hopkins and Duke can add up to tens of millions of dollars a year, which is real money even for universities with substantial endowments. To cover the cost, universities must find donors to underwrite financial-aid programs or cut back elsewhere. Hopkins both received a $1.8 billion gift from Michael Bloomberg and delayed some construction projects for several years, including a student center. “The moral commitment to increasing the socioeconomic diversity of the class must be tethered to a financial strategy,” Daniels told me.
I have been writing about economic diversity for almost two decades, since I discovered in 2004 how affluent the student body had become even at some public colleges, like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. And I have noticed a pattern. Although every university leader I interview claims to care about the issue, many of them fail to make it a priority. College admissions resembles a zero-sum game, and other campus constituencies have more influence than working-class and poor students. University leaders find it hard to eliminate the squash or sailing team. They find it easier to build a new building than to spend the money on financial aid. They have not been able to break fully with elite higher education’s roots as a preserve of the wealthy.
At the same time, many are not willing to defend the system over which they preside. When students, professors and outsiders criticize colleges for their lack of economic diversity, the administrators often make changes — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically. It has happened at Johns Hopkins, Wash. U. and other elite colleges over the past decade.
Duke seems as if it might be in the early stages of this process, with the outcome still uncertain. Some of its leaders insist that no issue is more important to them. They have made tentative progress to shed their status as the country’s least economically diverse top-ranked college. But they have not made the hard choices that a lasting commitment to economic diversity requires. The scholarships for affluent students and the wuflation-priced dining halls still compete for resources.
When I asked Duke’s F.G.L.I. students how they thought about the university’s policies, they tended to express a set of common sentiments. They are very grateful for the opportunities they are receiving. They simply wish Duke enrolled more students like them and the people with whom they grew up. “I just think I got really, really lucky,” Dong told me. “Duke does a good job for the F.G.L.I. students who they do admit. However, I know they are not admitting very many of us.”
Alfonso-DeSouza framed the issue nicely. “Duke students are really oriented to the world,” she said. “I think the essence of Duke is wanting to bring change not only for yourself but for others.” What could be more consistent with an elite college education than insisting that the colleges providing that education live up to their own stated ideals?
David Leonhardt is a senior writer for The Times. He writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics via IPEDS and College Navigator
Notes: Data shown in the graphics is for the school year 2020-21. For the table of schools with high endowments per student, endowment data is rounded to the nearest 1,000. For the chart on institutions’ sticker versus net prices, selected schools in each state are the most competitive private school, the state’s flagship public university and a liberal arts institution. Prices are rounded to the nearest 100. Mid-income describes a family income of between $48,001 and $75,000 per year.