Illustration by Adam Niklewicz

A bearded man in a smart blue suit is perched on a stool at the front of the main auditorium in The Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Behind him is a flowing, black curtain framed by a vine of red and gold leaves. For over an hour, he and his colleagues have held the rapt attention of a crowd of more than 100. Offering an interactive presentation, they have garnered both laughter and applause. And now, as they finish, and as the theater lights shine brightly down on him, audience members leave their seats and make a beeline for the stage.

He is a star of sorts, but he's not an actor--the set pieces around him belong to an upcoming school play. Rather, he is Duke's dean of undergraduate admissions. Christoph Guttentag has spent the day visiting city schools; it is the second day of four that he will log on this trip canvassing the city for would-be Duke students. Tonight, as happens after most Discover Duke admissions presentations around the country, many of the students have stuck around for some face time. They approach Guttentag, one or two at a time, engaging him with a firm handshake and a clear introduction. Some have questions: How does he distinguish between someone who is truly dedicated to his or her activities and someone who is just rÈsumÈ-building? How much will the Pratt School of Engineering be expanded? Others just want to introduce themselves.

Admissions 101

What they are all seeking, and what Guttentag ostensibly holds, is the secret to getting into what has become one of the nation's most selective universities--and continues to become more and more selective with each passing year.

Duke has long been considered an elite university. In 1984, The New York Times Magazine ran a story about "hot colleges" that featured Duke on the cover, and the following year, in the second edition of its Best Colleges guide, U.S. News & World Report ranked Duke sixth among national universities. (This year, Duke was ranked fifth.) Every year, admissions staff members tell the incoming class that it is the smartest and most accomplished yet; and alumni are often heard to say, if partly in jest, that they doubt they would be admitted to Duke today. But those familiar with Duke's admissions process say that, beyond gradual improvement, the past few years have seen a dramatic jump in the university's selectivity. Part of that can be attributed to increased visibility and naturally evolving public perceptions, and part to intensified recruiting efforts and a conscious shift in admissions standards.

Kathy Phillips, associate director of admissions, recalls a point about three years ago when she realized that the university was rejecting, or, at best, wait-listing, students who would have been accepted the year before. "I actually felt a physical change from year to year" that coincided with a large jump in board scores, she says. After nine years of reading applications and taking part in admissions judgments, "it was the first time where I felt like I could actually define that difference."

The shift has also been evident to those on "the other side of the desk." Steven Singer, who has worked at Manhattan's hyper-competitive Horace Mann School for twenty-one years and is currently director of college counseling there, says that, while Duke's standards have been on the rise for years, he has noticed more pronounced changes over the last four, in particular. "When I first came, a kid who was in the middle of the class or just below it, with SAT scores that these days would translate into the 600s per exam, and [with] a reasonable amount of school involvement, could get in to Duke from Horace Mann. Now, you can have 750s, all A's, push all the right extracurricular buttons, and if you do not have an interesting mind, or do not enjoy intellectual discourse, you could still be in trouble.

"Duke is in an orbit now that it was not a decade ago. And it's probably two orbits above where it was two decades ago."

Duke's latest admissions figures are impressive. In the fall of 2004, the university received 18,089 applications, setting a university record for the fourth straight year. That total included the highest number of applicants to both Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Pratt School of Engineering. (Pratt, in particular, saw large jumps in both the number of applications and matriculation rate, a shift administrators attribute to the draw of new state-of-the-art facilities such as the Fitzpatrick Center.) Duke's acceptance rate fell for the eighth straight year, to 22.1 percent, the second lowest rate ever.

What's especially notable, Guttentag and his colleagues point out, is that the recent applicant pools have not only been larger but also stronger than ever by many measures. Though they are careful to note that SAT scores are but one of several criteria considered, those scores do provide an idea of the strength of the new applicant pool. Admissions data show that Duke has received a relatively consistent number of applications over the past ten years from students who scored 1400 or below on the SAT. Meanwhile, applications boasting scores above 1400 have taken off, increasing markedly from 1996 to 2002 to 2004, and again this year.

"In this year's applicant pool, we had 1,300 students apply who had a 1550 or above on the SAT," Guttentag says. "Four years ago, in 2001, that number was 640. And there's been no re-centering." As a result, mean SAT scores for applicants have risen by forty over the last decade (compared with forty-eight for admitted students and fifty-five for matriculants). This year alone, applicant SAT scores rose by nine points, matriculants' by twenty.

The improvement in the pool is evident in other areas, as well. Over the past several decades, high-school students nationwide have become savvier in the ways they prepare for the college-admissions process. Students are counseled to seek out and showcase community service and leadership experiences. It's not uncommon for parents of students bound for selective colleges to hire private educational consultants to aid in the application process. More recently, many colleges have begun to request that applicants submit a rÈsumÈ with application materials.

More college-level courses are being offered to high-school students through

Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, and more Duke applicants are taking advantage of them, Phillips says. "Being in the top 10 percent [of an applicant's high-school class] is now virtually a given." Though fewer schools officially rank their students these days, "most admits [who are ranked] are in the top 5 percent of their class, if not in the top five graduates. We see few grades in the applicant pool below a B." This year, Duke admitted just 41 percent of the nearly 1,500 valedictorians who applied.

"The numbers are coming at the top as opposed to the bottom," Phillips says. "The bottom is dropping out, is how I'd put it."

"That's why we can find ourselves not admitting students this year that we would have admitted ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago, or even last year, for that matter," adds Guttentag. "Not because of anything that the students have done wrong."

More students are applying in part because more students know about Duke than they did, say, ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Sandra Foyil, the mother of Duke senior Larissa Goodwin and a member of the Parents Advisory Council for Duke's division of student affairs, says she does not recall having any knowledge of Duke when she was growing up in New Jersey in the Seventies. "If I did," she says, "I probably thought it was just a small Southern school." (She applied primarily to colleges in the Northeast, ultimately choosing Rutgers University.)

By the time she was helping her daughter explore colleges, Duke was no longer an unknown. Like many parents of high-achieving high-school students across the nation, she planned college trips not just to Boston and other traditional Northeastern college hotspots, but also to North Carolina to see Duke, as well as Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She says her daughter was drawn to Duke by the competitive academics and the warm climate.

She recalls sitting at the table in her New Jersey home one day last year with her younger son, Tyler, then in eighth grade, and a friend of his. Somehow, the discussion had swung to where the boys wanted to attend college. The friend said he would likely stay in the Philadelphia area, but, "Tyler said, 'I'm going to Duke.' His friend--without skipping a beat--said, 'you better start studying, then.' "

"I don't think you have to explain to people anymore who Duke is, where Duke is, who it competes against for students," says Kathy Cleaver, who worked as a Duke admissions officer from 1984 to 1988, and is now in her fourteenth year as a college counselor at Durham Academy, a prep school just down the road from Duke's West Campus. "Where I spent a great deal of time talking about that, it's not necessary anymore."

In fact, Foyil recalls that her daughter's guidance counselor did not "super encourage" applying to Duke, in part because of how competitive it was. "Duke is considered right up there with the Ivies in South Jersey," says Foyil.

According to Guttentag, Duke both suffers and benefits from not being part of the Ivy League. "On the one hand," he says, "it's an easy shorthand for quality and prestige." Especially among students at the most prestigious Northeastern prep schools, he says that "Ivy League" still has a special ring to it. And Phyllis Supple, Duke's associate director of admissions for Asia, Africa, Australia, and Canada, notes that even among foreign students the long-established dominance of the Ivies in public perception is hard to break. "Even outside the Northeast," says Guttentag, "I think the notion of going 'back East' for college is still a more typical thing to think about than to head South."