Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has released new information regarding its first-year undergraduates on campus this fall. Compared to recent years, the share of Black first-year students at Duke has declined.
One-third of students in Duke’s Class of 2030 are White, about 30 percent are Asian, 9 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and only 5 percent are Black. Additionally, less than one percent of first-year Duke students are Native American, about 3 percent identify as multiracial, and 9 percent did not disclose their race.
Compared to the prior year, Black first-year enrollment dropped by 2 percentage points. Two years ago, Black first-year enrollment was more than double what is now; Black students represented 13 percent of first-year students at Duke during the Fall 2024 semester.
However, a statement from Duke says that “because of differences between the IPEDS method for reporting race and ethnicity and Duke’s prior approach to reporting this information to the university community, the class profiles for 2029 and 2030 are not directly comparable with the profiles Duke shared in previous years.”
Those differences relate to how students who identify as multiracial are counted in the class profile. Before the Class of 2029, students who identified as more than one race were counted in each racial background they identified with. These students are now counted once under the multiracial category.
