Duke University recently announced a decision to offer free tuition for the 2023-2024 academic year to students from South and North Carolina who have family incomes below $150,000. Of these students that have family incomes of less than $65,000, Duke will help cover costs for housing, food, and other student necessities. The university has put $2 million more into financial aid to help make their college more affordable.

This announcement sounds very promising, but who does this plan help? Is it actually effective towards the school's affordability? What does this look like for a new recruit?

To understand how Duke's free tuition initiative stacks up against other colleges, let's look at some numbers for NCAA D1 schools with football that are 4-year or above.

Source: IPEDS Survey 2021-2022, EADA 2022

In This Analysis

• How to Qualify & What You Get
• How Does Duke's Average Yearly Tuition with Free First-Year Tuition Compare to Others?
• 15 NCAA DI Schools with $40,000 to $50,000 / Year Tuition
• 22 NCAA D1 Schools with In-State Tuition Around $57,000 to $62,000
• 14 Direct Comparisons to Duke's Free Tuition Plan

How to Qualify & What You Get

As mentioned previously, not everyone can get free tuition. This depends on your total family income.

How Does Duke's Average Yearly Tuition with Free First-Year Tuition Compare to Others?

Duke University is a private, nonprofit institution and costs over $80,000 a year. The average tuition and fees every year come out to about $60,244 for each student. This price is high in the college tuition ranking, with other schools such as Columbia, Cornell, Yale, Georgetown, Brown, and Boston College having similar costs. All of these schools are among the most prestigious in the country, but how can people afford them? 

Here is where Duke's new tuition plan comes in. When one year is taken off of the school's average tuition price, Duke students will pay about $45,183 on average for their other three years. Duke is suddenly among DI schools such as Sacred Hart University, Baylor University, and the University of Tulsa. Compared to these schools, Duke has higher academic and athletic prestige, but at similar costs. This price is still unreasonably high, but it now takes Duke out of the costs of the elite institutions, while still holding the same status.

Duke is one of the hardest schools to get into in the country. With a 6% acceptance rate and an incredibly high tuition cost, Duke is not an option for many people. However, with this plan, Duke also announced that they will expand financial aid by $6-7 million dollars each year for the next five years. This means that although Duke's announcement might only cover a small portion of the student population right now, more and more students will likely be eligible for free tuition in future years. It could also mean that schools that have similar costs may follow suit. Making private prestigious institutions more affordable would be a huge step in making higher education a more achievable option for all people.

For people that love data and want more details, we've made a number of lists below so you can visualize fully what $45,000 tuition can buy you and which D1 schools have the most affordable tuition.

15 NCAA DI Schools with $40,000 to $50,000 / Year Tuition

In this tuition range, there are only private schools that made it to the list. This means that the tuition is the same for in-state and out-of-state students.

The most expensive D1 public university, 4-year or above, is The College of William & Mary: this school has an in-state tuition of $23,812 and out-of-state at $40,089.

22 NCAA D1 Schools with In-State Tuition from $57,000 to $62,000

Duke's tuition is $60,244. We thought it'd make sense to look at a list of schools in this price range. Once again, we find only private, non-profit universities on this list of D1 schools.

What is interesting is that Notre Dame made $215 million in sports in 2021-2022 but only spent $171 million. Their profit? A whopping $44 MILLION! We are not sure what our reaction is on this. As a business, this is an awesome bottom line, but as an educational institution, maybe not. Hopefully they put that money to good use somewhere else for the students.

In the same year, Duke made $150 million from athletics and spent $148 million — a profit of $2.5 million. The table below shows most schools reinvest most of what they made from athletics back into athletics. For example, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest and Bucknell are amongst the many.

14 Direct Comparisons to Duke's Free Tuition Plan

The list below are schools with a similar number of athletes and tuition level to Duke's $60K and $45K with free tuition.

• Division: NCAA Division I with football
• Private, non-profit
• 4 year or above
• Tuition: $45K – $60K
• Number of Athletes: 6,000 – 6,999

Among this group of peers, Duke University makes the most in athletics. Emory Univeristy has the lowest athletics revenue at $9.4 million last year. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach has lowest graduation rate of students with bachelor's degrees in 4-years at 32%.

In Closing

Ultimately, the program is a great opportunity for students from North Carolina and South Carolina. To save $60,000 is nothing to sneeze at. It's an interesting initiative. Hopefully, this announcement will inspire other institutions like Duke to begin to lower their costs. Right now, higher education is unattainable for many high school students. When these schools become more affordable, more people are able to aim their goals at a school such as Duke University.

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* Originally published on June 23, 2023, by 2aDays Staff