Duke University

Overview

Duke University, also called Duke, is a research university based in Durham, North Carolina. As the biggest beneficiary of the Duke Endowment, the university has become one of the wealthiest private universities in the United States.

Duke currently offers a diverse range of majors and minors in various fields of study. Students can also opt to design their own interdisciplinary majors, while students interested in engineering can design their own engineering major through the IDEAS program. Certificate programs in various fields of the arts and sciences are also available. The university is known for its strong academic programs in the fields of law and the health sciences, with its programs for nursing, medicine, physical therapy, political science, and law placing at the top of national rankings.

The university's beginnings can be traced back to Brown's Schoolhouse, a private subscription school established in North Carolina in 1838. By 1859, the school had been renamed Trinity College, in honor of its partnership with the United Methodist Church, which provided financial support to the school. To attract more students and faculty, the school moved to the city of Durham in 1892, in the area that is now the school's East Campus. The school was renamed as Duke University in 1924 in honor of the Duke family, who have been the benefactors of the university since the 1890s.

Throughout its history, the university has produced numerous Nobel Prize laureates, Turing Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rhodes Scholars, and Churchill Scholars. Duke alumni have also gone on to head various Fortune 500 companies (e.g. Apple, Cisco Systems, Bear Stearns, and JPMorgan Chase) and establish renowned charitable foundations (e.g. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Carlyle Group).

Today, Duke University is committed to pursuing a strategic academic plan that emphasizes inquiry and discovery, transformative education, and locally grounded global engagement. To this end, the university is home to various institutes and centers that promote advanced research in a wide variety of fields and specializations, such as the health sciences, public affairs, and genomic and computational biology. The university also provides plenty of opportunities for undergraduate research, along with internships and research fellowships.

Duke also maintains a number of state-of-the-art research facilities. Its campus is home to Duke Forest, the largest private research forest in North Carolina, where research on animal behavior and micrometeorological studies are carried out. Through the Duke University Marine Lab, students can also carry out hands-on oceanographic studies and participate in faculty-mentored research opportunities.

You can also learn more about the educational performance of Duke University in our ranking of US universities & colleges.