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No offense taken from this Duke alum. After my 9 years at Duke, I was for 14 years a professor at a large land grant so I know the different environments. Because Duke is more selective, the students are more uniformly prepared for university-level work. The faculty can expect to push them a lot harder and can hold them to a higher standard of academic achievement. I invested 14 years in a land grant so I'm not slamming them - their mission is defined differently from the private universities and they are going to take a wider variety of applicants some of whom, through no fault of their own, are less well prepared and are going to play a little catch up. As a prof that means that during a semester you can't take a class quite as far as you like.

The other thing you get a place like Duke is a nationwide network of contacts that last your entire life. For the ambitious, that can be extremely valuable.

I lived in Edens for 7 of my 8 undergraduate semesters. It's a closely packed residential dorm. We all knew each others business including who had a "guest" in the room. No way you could get away with anything like what's described in the e-mail. It's hyperbolic, figurative and offensive. But people do that all the time. My parents used to tell me that if I didn't straighten up they were "going to skin me alive", and which of you hasn't said you were going to "kill your professor" after receiving a bad grade? Unfortunately, this is really bad timing for such excessive language.