It's time to Put Up Your Dukes

Put up one's dukes: to raise one's clenched fists in front of one's body and stand in a threatening or defiant manner, in preparation for a fistfight.

I recently hosted one of our www.ZoomTalks.us (Coffee in the Clouds) interviews with the amazing Dan Ariely - an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. I am a big fan of DanAriely.com 

In preparation for the interview I spent some time on Duke.edu 

2024: With the Duke University cost of attendance amounting to approximately $83,263 per year—inclusive of the combined Duke tuition and fees—the total Duke University cost comes to around $333,000 for 4 years.

Why is Duke tuition so high?

Duke pays what it calls "startup costs" for a lot of professors, particularly in the sciences. And decisions about hiring faculty can drive up costs in other parts of the university. Duke considers a lot of that spending when it says $90,000 is what it costs to educate an undergraduate each year.

In 1984, it cost $10,000 a year to go to Duke University. Today, it's more than $80,000 a year. But according to the executive vice provost at Duke, that's actually a discount. "We're investing on average about $90,000 in the education of each student, and Duke is one of the most elite research institutions in the world."

From their website: Jennifer West is a professor of bioengineering and materials science with a long list of publications, awards and titles. To hire West away from Rice University, money wasn't enough. She came with an entourage. "I moved a whole entire research group with me, so I had to move a lot of people and then we had to move a lot of our equipment and rebuild our lab," she says. "They actually sent architects to Rice who looked at our lab facilities there, then used that information to go back and design the facility that would work for us at Duke."

OK, so now the students who are PHYSICALLY on campus at Duke, would benefit from interaction with someone like Dr. West. On campus - in a lab. So, here is the debate (more from the website):

Charles Schwartz, a retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying university finances for the past 20 years, takes issue with this way of accounting. He says it's unfair to place the financial cost of professors like Jennifer West, who spend most of their time in the lab, on undergraduate students. "It's just wrong to bundle all those costs together," he says.

It looks like 55% of students pay full price, over $80,000. 10% pay nothing. The rest of the students pay anywhere from $10,000 to $54,000 per year. 

So if you're a student (physically) at Duke, are you getting a massive discount on the cost of your education? Or are you subsidizing a giant educational and research complex that you (as an undergraduate student) will barely come into contact with?

If you're engaged in research and capitalizing on your professors' expertise, maybe you're getting something that's worth more than what you paid. If you've got a good financial aid package, you're definitely getting a good deal. But if you're a full-paying student, who's not learning much from professors outside the classroom, it's the research university that's getting the deal.

Where are you going with this, Tom?

I am not looking to 'put up my dukes' with Duke.edu. This blog could be about any college or university in the world, as all schools are fighting for tuition dollars. Any and all schools are now serving any and all students physically on campus - or 100% virtually (online) - from anywhere in the world. Ah, CumulusUniversity.org anyone??? 

I am huge Dan Ariely fan. I have read all of his books. I have watched his TED Talks. I am one of the 29.7K followers on https://www.youtube.com/@danariely 

If I was younger (or had a time machine) I might be a student who is paying somewhere between $10,000 and $80,000 to physically attend class at https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/ and maybe I would have coffee from time to time with https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty/dan-ariely

But now, today in 2024, I have to settle with spending an hour one-on-one with Dan Ariely, and having Coffee In the Clouds (virtually) with Dan. For free. 

Would like to join us?...We have room at the table

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