World Renowned?

International students on Duke

When Rudy Gopalakrishnan, a 2002 graduate from India, received his admission letter to Duke, he rushed to tell his family and friends the good news. But their only response was puzzlement.

"They thought I was joining a soda company (Duke is the name of a soda brand in India)," he wrote in an e-mail. "That's as much as they knew about Duke."

Gopalakrishnan's experience is typical among students from other countries. Ask an international student on any college campus what schools are well known in their home country, and you will most often hear the names of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and occasionally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ask an international student if Duke is a well-known American university, and the response is invariable: "Only because of basketball."

Although Duke has a prestigious national status--number four, according to U.S. News & World Report--the University is still climbing the ladder of international reputation. But over the last 10 years, Duke has made significant progress, and "internationalization" has become as common a phrase among faculty and administrators as "Cameron Crazies" is among students.

A name no one knows

With a few exceptions, most undergraduate international students at the University had never heard of Duke until they began looking around for U.S. universities. Moreover, most of their friends and families in their home country had no previous knowledge of the University. Most, however, had a general knowledge of schools like Stanford, MIT and the Ivies.

That can hurt Duke's chances at attracting international applicants, not only because fewer potential students are aware of it, but because those who are know that companies in their home country may not place much value on a Duke degree.

In Japan, 1998 graduate Ken Inouye reports, only the foreign companies recognize the Duke name. Gopalakrishnan was also confronted with similar reception in India.

"I work for a multinational consulting company in which a large number of other employees are from U.S. schools," Gopalakrishnan wrote. "Hence, credibility was not an issue when I applied for a job. However, with Indian companies, Duke was foreign to them. They had only heard of Harvard, MIT and Stanford. That posed a few issues for me."

That can be important for international applicants, who often decide to study in the United States because it will distinguish them. "[An American education] will help me a lot more after I graduate," says senior Simon Higson of Oxford. "I probably will stand out quite a bit."

But Carlisle Harvard, director of the International House, says foreign employers are usually satisfied when they hear that Duke is ranked among the top 10 schools.

"[International students] need to have some reason to pick the schools that they pick and if they're going to spend the money to study in the United States, they want to come back home with a degree that they can say, 'This is from a top 10 school,'" Harvard says. "Even if everybody in the country doesn't know Duke yet, they can still say, 'I got my degree from one of the top 10.'"

Such rankings are a major factor in attracting students as well. Many international students who would otherwise know very little about Duke choose to attend when they see its U.S. News & World Report ranking.

"I think a lot of internationals don't really have a concept of a backup school, so they just apply to the top 10 schools," Chugani says. "It doesn't really occur to them to apply to anything in the 20s or 30s."

Gopalakrishnan also first learned about Duke through the rankings. He eventually chose to come to Duke "because I did not get into the colleges that were ranked #1 and #2 on the U.S. News & World Report ranking," he wrote.

Although some dismiss the rankings as trivial, the University realizes their importance in recruiting international students.

"As much as people say that those rankings are superficial and those rankings should not be taken seriously, [they are] a very important resource for our international students," Harvard says. "They don't have the opportunity to come over here and travel and visit a lot of different universities. They've got to go by something, and that's one of the things they use."

That fact has been part of the reason Duke's freshman class has the same percentage of international students--6 percent--as most of its peer institutions, despite its later entrance into the international field, says Gilbert Merkx, vice provost for international affairs.

"Part of Duke's increased international visibility is that now we're seen as a top-10 institution, whereas 20 years ago we were not," he says.

The drive for internationalization

Indeed, Duke's international visibility is increasing, not only because of the rankings. Since the 1990s, internationalization has been a major focus of the University, and it is one of the primary strategic goals of Building On Excellence, Duke's long-range plan approved last year by the Board of Trustees.

"Duke has been actively involved in internationalizing itself for the last 10 years. It has made extraordinary strides, but there is still a lag," Merkx says. "I think that Duke's international achievements are beginning to get recognized and we have a growing international reputation. But we have not yet had the kind of recognition which I think is beginning to come."

As envisioned in the strategic plan, internationalization means not only reaching out to new pools of students, but also turning a Duke education into an international experience that transforms students into citizens fit for the global community. To achieve that goal, the University has increased the number of international faculty from 16 in 1992 to 244 last year. Over the same time period, the number of federally funded centers for foreign-language areas or international studies has doubled, from four to eight, and foreign language requirements have become more stringent--all changes that give the educational experience a more international scope.

But to do that successfully, the strategic plan points out, it is necessary to increase the percentage of international students--and conversely, succeeding at internationalization will attract a greater number of students from overseas.

For this reason, admissions officers have been recruiting abroad much more frequently, with trips to western Europe, eastern Europe, Turkey, Norway, Asia and central America. Supple says she travels with representatives from other universities.

"When we do travel we're giving public information sessions for all interested students. We visit local schools, international schools and meet with alumni," Supple says. "We often have breakfast meetings with the local guidance advisers and we will visit advising centers. We build relationships... just to reach out."

Beginning in 1998, President Nan Keohane has also made international visits--to Asia, Brazil, Mexico, Panama and Canada--to improve Duke's reputation. In total, that makes "60,000 miles of trips around the world," says Bob Booth, assistant to the president for international development. "Every trip has been the first time that the Duke president has visited these countries."

The results are unambiguous: the number of international students rose from 86 in 1992 to 276 last year. That, in turn, allows another approach to international recruitment.

"We have also been expanding the number of alumni overseas that will help us recruit and interview," Supple says. "The list gets longer over time and as more do it, more want to do it."

Slowly but surely, those efforts are beginning to overcome the problem of name recognition.

"Duke is a climbing star," senior Tan Gulek says. "People in Turkey have started to know about it in the last five years or so."

In Singapore, the situation is similar. "At the time I entered Duke, it wasn't well known," senior Po Chin Tan says. "But it is becoming well known because of its ties with business schools and the biomedical sciences."

The ties to which Tan alludes often come at the graduate level. For instance, the Fuqua School of Business recently established partnerships with Seoul National University in South Korea and Peking University in China; the partnerships will allow for faculty and student exchanges as well as collaborative research.

This trend allows Duke to build on an already strong reputation among graduate students--33 percent of the graduate student body, and more than half of graduate applicants, are international. Nationwide, international enrollment tends to be higher at the graduate level.

"You can compare the name of Duke to Harvard," says Goncalo Godinho, a law student. "They're probably the strongest names in Portugal. I think it is very well known [at the graduate level] through Europe."

Expanding financial aid

The most dramatic step the University has taken, however, came last year at the undergraduate level, with the decision to offer need-based financial aid to international students. Admissions officers say that change has contributed greatly to this year's international applicant pool.

"One of the best things that ever happened to us here at Duke is need-based financial aid," Supple says. "What that means is we've been able to attract applicants from countries where the economy could never sustain a Duke education."

Before the decision, most international students came from well-to-do families who could afford high tuition fees, although a few, like Tan, received government or other scholarships. The new policy gives the University a more diverse applicant pool, financially and culturally. This year, Duke saw applicants from countries like Bulgaria, Ghana and Pakistan.

"[Financial aid] gave us a chance for some of the best and brightest students in the world," Harvard says. "I think it's just going to enrich the diversity... when you've got international students who are from other cultures but also from very different economic strata."

While other institutions have been offering financial aid to international students for some time, this is the first time Duke has offered need-based aid to international students in 25 years.

"We've wanted to do this, we've talked about this, and the time was just right," says Jim Belvin, director of undergraduate financial aid. "All the circumstances were in place. We had some amount of resources made available and so we began this year."

Admissions decisions for international students are still not need-blind, however. Only five universities, including Harvard and Yale, offer need-blind international aid. Yale administrators say adopting that policy caused a large increase in its international applicant pool, although the total number of international students who are accepted and attend Yale has remained the same.

"[With need-blind financial aid], I think our pool is more representative of a broad range of backgrounds all over the world," says Richard Shaw, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Yale. "It has dramatically changed the character of competition for these students. I think that international students are aware of this shift in the competition."

Shaw adds that he does not think many schools can afford to offer such aid to international students.

Even so, Duke's switch to offering need-based aid met with an increase in the number of international applicants to 1200 for this year's freshman class from 712 the year before.

That increase, especially compared to the 477 applicants in 1992, is a clear indicator of the fact that the University's drive for internationalization is making progress. After starting 10 years behind other institutions of its kind, Duke may have a long way to go before its international reputation--or overseas alumni base--matches that of other institutions of its kind, but the University is working earnestly on closing the gap.

Still, administrators realize the process will take time.

"There's a long lifetime between what a University does and what it gets its reputation for doing," Merkx says. "And Duke is an institution that has in many respects made extraordinary progress and is now being recognized in many areas."