Duke Expects Its Most Racially Diverse Freshman Class, But New Black Enrollments Drop for the Third Year in a Row

A recent press release from Duke University announced that the incoming Class of 2011 will be the university’s most diverse class ever. Forty-four percent of Duke’s incoming class will be “students of color.”

By a large margin, Asian-American students make up the largest segment of Duke’s students of color. There will be 500 Asian-American students making up about 29 percent of all freshmen.

Preliminary numbers show that 156 black students have indicated they will enroll. This is about 9.2 percent of all incoming freshmen. In the fall of 2006 there were 160 black first-year students who made up 9.5 percent of the incoming class. In fact this will be the third year in a row where the number of black freshmen at Duke has declined. In the fall of 2004 there were 188 black freshmen at Duke making up 11.5 percent of all first-year students.