Duke Tuition to Increase 4.5 Percent

Duke’s planning also calls for increasing university support for undergraduate financial aid

Friday, February 23, 2007

Durham, NC -- The Duke University Board of Trustees on Friday approved a 4.5 percent tuition increase for undergraduate students in the coming academic year.

Duke’s planning also calls for increasing university support for undergraduate financial aid.

Tuition for students enrolled in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Pratt School of Engineering will be $34,335 for 2007-08, up 4.5 percent from $32,845 for the current year. About 84 percent of Duke undergraduates are enrolled in Trinity College; 16 percent matriculate in the Pratt School.

The total cost to attend Duke this coming school year, including room and board, will be $45,121, an increase of 4.6 percent from 2006-07.

The trustees also approved new tuition rates for Duke’s graduate and professional schools.

Approximately 45 percent of undergraduates receive financial support to attend Duke; about 40 percent receive need-based aid. Duke’s spending on need-based undergraduate aid totaled almost $47 million in 2005-06, up more than $20 million from spending five years ago. In total, Duke spent more than $143 million on financial aid grants for undergraduate, graduate and professional students in 2005-06, the most recent year for which final totals have been calculated.

Duke support for financial aid increased in 2006-07 and will increase again in 2007-08, although it is too early to say precisely what that amount will be, said Provost Peter Lange, the university’s senior academic officer. The university has already announced expanded support beginning in 2007-08 for need-based aid students participating in the university’s new DukeEngage Program. (For more about DukeEngage, see http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/engage/.)

“We continue to be very aware of the impact that our tuition has on those who want to attend Duke,” Lange said. “We work to keep down our tuition increases and to enhance financial aid to meet students’ full demonstrated need so that we can ensure that the most talented students come to Duke. This requires an extraordinary allocation of university resources. This is why President Brodhead launched Duke’s Financial Aid Initiative to substantially increase our endowment to support financial aid across the university.”

Under Duke’s need-blind admissions policy, the university admits students based on an assessment of their academic performance and their potential and ability to contribute to the undergraduate experience. It does not consider an applicant’s financial status or the ability of his or her family to pay for a college education. The university then commits to provide 100 percent of a student’s demonstrated financial need for all four years of the student’s undergraduate education.

The annual average need-based grant to an undergraduate financial aid recipient in 2005-06 was more than $24,000.

Duke’s $300 million Financial Aid Initiative seeks new endowment of $245 million for undergraduate aid and $55 million to support graduate and professional school students.To date,the university has received more than $216 million in gifts and pledges to support this effort, including a $10 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that was announced this week.

When announcing the Financial Aid Initiative in December 2005, Duke President Richard H. Brodhead said financial aid is “crucial to Duke’s long-term ability to attract the very best students and to make quality education affordable for all families,” adding that it is a permanent and fundamental obligation of the university.

In recent years, the university also has made several modifications to its need-based financial aid formula that have expanded the number of students now eligible for aid and increased the amount of aid received by eligible students. Most prominent among these modifications was an adjustment to the formula for determining home equity included in the need-analysis process. Another was changing how college savings are counted as family assets.

“These and other modifications underline the university's ongoing effort to strengthen its financial aid program,” said James Belvin Jr., Duke’s financial aid director.

The tuition rates for 2007-08 for the graduate and professional schools are:

Divinity School -- $15,860, up 6 percent over the current year.

Fuqua School of Business -- $41,670 (daytime MBA), up 5.9 percent.

Graduate School -- $34,140, up 4.5 percent.

Law School -- $39,960, up 4.5 percent.

Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences -- $26,600, up 4.3 percent.

School of Medicine -- $38,982, up 5.7 percent.

School of Nursing -- $32,400, up 14.6 percent.

The proposed nursing school increase will put it more in line with tuition charged at peer schools, Lange said.

Final decisions on the budget, including tuition levels for Duke’s schools and Trinity College, will be approved at the trustees’ meeting in May.