Duke University

The Durham, North Carolina-based Duke University is a prestigious private research institution. In 1838, members of the Methodist and Quaker faiths established a school in what is now the town of Trinity. In 1892, the school relocated to the city of Durham. In 1924, tobacco and electric power entrepreneur James Buchanan Duke formed The Duke Endowment, and the following year, the organisation changed its name to commemorate Washington Duke, James Buchanan Duke's father, who had passed away.

Over 8,600 acres (3,500 hectares) make up the campus, which is comprised of three continuous sub-campuses in Durham as well as a marine facility located near Beaufort. Incorporating Gothic architecture, the West Campus, which was designed in large part by African American architect Julian Abele, who graduated first in his class from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, features the 210-foot (64-meter) Duke Chapel at the campus' centre and highest point of elevation. The West Campus is adjacent to the Medical Center. First-year students live on East Campus, which is located a distance of 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometres) away and has buildings in the Georgian style. The university is responsible for the administration of two institutions at the same time in Asia: the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore (which was founded in 2005).

Major publications consistently place Duke University towards the top of their lists of best colleges and institutions in both the United States and the rest of the globe. With a total acceptance rate of 5.7% for the class of 2025, the undergraduate admissions are very competitive and rank among the most competitive in the nation. Due to the fact that Duke University devotes more than one billion dollars annually to research, it is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 biggest research institutions in the United States. More than a dozen members of the faculty are consistently included in yearly rankings of the most-cited scholars in the world. As of the year 2019, the institution has been associated with the work of 15 Nobel laureates and 3 recipients of the Turing Award. In addition, among Duke's alumni are fifty people who have been awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, which is the third-highest number of Churchill Scholars of any university (behind only Princeton and Harvard). Between the years 1986 and 2015, Duke also had the fifth-highest number of Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Truman Scholars, Goldwater Scholars, and Udall Scholars of any American university. Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, attended Duke University, which is also the alma mater of 14 living billionaires.

With more than 43,000 workers, Duke University is the fourth-largest private employer in the state of North Carolina as of the year 2021. Several different publications have lauded the university's employment opportunities as among the best in the country.