Admissions dean Guttentag: the ultimate decision makerPhoto: Les Todd

On the other hand, having worked for nine years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he faced constant comparisons with the rest of the Ivies, Guttentag says he finds that being outside the Ivy League can work in Duke's favor. "It makes it easier for us to say, 'We are who we are.' Obviously, we always judge ourselves by comparing Duke to other schools--including the Ivies--but there is still a strong feeling of, 'We are Duke, not someone else.' "

In some circles, Duke is now mentioned in the same breath as those schools that it has long targeted. John Burness, Duke's senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, cites a recent New York Times article that leads with a comment about local students' "admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Duke." Still, administrators do not dispute that one of Duke's biggest challenges in recruiting both prospective applicants and admitted students is facing up to the Ivies, especially the top-tier Ivies--Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. College counselors confirm Duke's standing at what Provost Peter Lange calls "the bottom of the very, very top schools in this country." And, while many are quick with specific examples of recent students turning down Harvard or Princeton for a spot at Duke--choices that were much rarer ten years ago, they say--that is still far from the norm.

Based on acceptance rates, Duke continues to fall behind a few choice schools in terms of selectivity. Against five of those schools in particular, Duke faces substantial recruiting obstacles. According to matriculation data, Duke is successful in wooing to campus only about 15 percent of those admitted students who are also accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, or Stanford. Against the next group--Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn--Duke does better, enrolling about 50 percent. In recruiting battles against the third five--Georgetown, Chicago, Washington University, Northwestern, and Cornell--Duke is successful about 80 percent of the time.

Those percentages, Lange and Guttentag say, have not changed much over the years. Guttentag explains that although some of the numbers against individual competitors vary year to year, it is tough to make significant progress because the rest of the schools are all getting better, too. "There are few schools," he says, "that recruit more aggressively than Harvard."

Christoph Guttentag thinks, and speaks, in broad strokes. He's courteous and frank. And what people quickly come to realize about him is that he'll answer just about any question--and appear to love doing it. On his trip to New York, Guttentag visits the Trinity School, a private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He sets up shop in the college counselor's office, a briefcase packed with Duke literature at his feet. Across the coffee table, three young men have arranged themselves on one overstuffed brown leather sofa; four young women have squeezed onto another. Most of the students present already have Duke brochures; most have visited the campus. After breaking the ice with a story about his own college search and an explanation of how he was assigned to this region--"As the boss, I get to decide, and lo and behold, I choose Manhattan"--he offers to conduct the presentation as an informal question-and-answer session.

Early questions address a range of issues that, to Guttentag, clearly seem interrelated: Duke and Durham, the attitude of students on campus, what one of the Trinity students, Rachel Berkowitz, refers to as "the Southern thing." These questions--veiled references to concerns that include Duke's location in a small city in the South and the amount of diversity on campus--are posed in almost every Duke information session, by visitors to campus, as well as prospective students at schools like this across the country. They are questions Guttentag and his staff know they must be prepared for.

There is a positive side to "the Southern thing," including good weather and a laid-back atmosphere, that represent areas where admissions officers believe they can gain traction in the race to distinguish Duke from the host of competing elite universities. Duke students "are ambitious and have high expectations," Guttentag says, "but it's also okay to camp out for basketball games, to paint yourself blue, to really care whether the team wins or loses." He stresses the sense of community that he sees at Duke, the value put on collaboration that is evident not only in that team spirit, but also ingrained in the curriculum itself through Duke's many interdisciplinary centers and programs.

He treats the students to his own impressions of the South, having moved to Durham from Philadelphia thirteen years ago. "To some extent, interactions are simpler, nicer, calmer." He acknowledges that cultural opportunities available in a small city like Durham are less rich than those in New York City, but points out a variety of activities that do exist.

But the crux of the answer to questions about "the Southern thing" is this: "There are so many people from so many places that that just doesn't dominate the culture," he says. "It doesn't feel like a Southern school. It feels like a national or international university that happens to be in North Carolina."

About 13 percent of Duke students come from North Carolina and about 35 percent from the South. In addition to North Carolina, the top two suppliers of Duke students have long been New York and Florida, with substantial numbers coming from states throughout the Northeast and Midwest, as well as California.

The applicant pool--and as a result the student body--has benefited of late from an influx of international students, a shift that Guttentag attributes largely to more aggressive recruiting. In the late Eighties, the number of international students in each entering class hovered in the teens and twenties. This year, Duke welcomed to campus 134 freshmen representing forty-five foreign countries of origin.

Racial diversity has also grown at an impressive pace, say admissions officials. Since it became an integrated campus just forty-two years ago, Duke has seen minority recruitment as an educational imperative, a recognition of America's shifting demographic makeup, and a responsibility in light of the South's troubled racial history. Minorities made up just 15.2 percent of the class that entered in 1987. By 1998, that number had cracked 30 percent. This year's entering class was 37.1 percent minority.

In administrative terms, one key to further expanding Duke's reach has been a substantial increase in the recruiting budget. During their deliberations over Duke's last five-year strategic plan, called "Building on Excellence," university administrators consulted a study that found Duke's admissions office did not have the funding to recruit competitively alongside its peer institutions, Guttentag says. To remedy the situation, they approved an annual recruiting-budget increase of $450,000, which went into effect in July 2001. Beyond expanding the staff and allowing for more recruiting trips, that money was used to maintain and improve the department's publications and its website, both of which have undergone a major revamping since that time. One noticeable difference between the new viewbook and the old--which Guttentag confirms is neither accident nor sheer coincidence--

is expanded emphasis on the arts, research, and Duke's Program II, which allows students to create their own curricula, integrating courses from a variety of departments.

In some ways, the secret to being admitted to Duke is a fairly simple one. It's an answer that Guttentag volunteers freely. The applicants that stand out, Guttentag says, "are the students that are fortunate enough to have a passion. Not all students do, and not all good students do; nor do we expect all students to have a real passion. But students who have been fortunate enough to discover what they really enjoy--and who are willing to put the time and effort into pursuing that with enthusiasm--stand out."

This represents a relatively new way of doing things, one that reflects, in part, Duke's participation in a national trend and, in part, discussions that have taken place among administrators involving Duke's educational mission.

For the admissions community nationwide, the Nineties brought a redefinition of the ideal candidate. Increasing numbers of well- but similarly qualified applicants forced admissions officers to look for new ways to identify standout applicants. As a result, competitive colleges shifted from looking primarily for "bright, well-rounded" individuals to seeking "angular" students, those with special, highly developed interests and talents--musical composition, say, or lacrosse or string theory--who, en masse, would create a bright, well-rounded class.

Guttentag stresses that, at Duke, the move to identify and actively recruit such individuals does not mean that the university no longer seeks students who are bright and well-rounded: "It was not so much a paradigm shift as it was an attempt to create a broader appeal, to cast a wider net." Lange explains that in discussions about admissions and recruiting, one question administrators always ask themselves is, "Are there communities of talented kids who still aren't coming to Duke?" Over the years, those discussions have played a key role in efforts to expand the recruitment of minorities and international students. But in the early Nineties, they focused in on a particular type of angular student--the intellectual.

Some university officials point to English professor Reynolds Price's fiery 1992 Founders' Day speech as one of the impetuses for change. In his address, Price '55 bemoaned the lack of intellectualism at Duke. He described a body of students enthusiastic about partying but seemingly disinterested in class, and lamented "the prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life."