Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892.In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke established Duke University, at which time the institution changed its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke.
The university's campus spans over 8,600 acres (35 km2) on three contiguous campuses in Durham as well as a marine lab in Beaufort. Duke's main campus—designed largely by architect Julian Abele—incorporates Gothic architecture with the 210-foot (64 m) Duke Chapel at the campus' center and highest point of elevation. The first-year-populated East Campus contains Georgian-style architecture, while the main Gothic-style West Campus 1.5 miles away is adjacent to the Medical Center. Duke is also the 7th wealthiest private university in America with $11.4 billion in cash and investments in fiscal year 2014.
Duke's research expenditures in the 2013 fiscal year were $993 million, the eighth largest in the nation. In 2014, Thomson Reuters named 32 Duke professors to its list of Highly Cited Researchers, making it fourth globally in terms of primary affiliations. Duke also ranks 5th among national universities to have produced Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall Scholars. 8 Nobel laureates, 3 Turing Award winners and 25 Churchill scholars are also affiliated with the university. In 2015, NPR ranked Duke first on its list of "schools that make financial sense". Duke's sports teams compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference and the basketball team is renowned for having won five NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships, the most recent in 2015.
Duke students often refer to the campus as "the Gothic Wonderland," a nickname referring to the Collegiate Gothic architecture of West Campus. Much of the campus was designed by Julian Abele, one of the first prominent African-American architects and the chief designer in the offices of architect Horace Trumbauer. The residential quadrangles are of an early and somewhat unadorned design, while the buildings in the academic quadrangles show influences of the more elaborate late French and Italian styles. The freshmen campus (East Campus) is composed of buildings in the Georgian architecture style. In 2011, Travel+Leisure listed Duke among the most beautiful college campuses in the United States.
Admission to Duke is highly selective; Duke received over 31,150 applications for the Class of 2019, and admitted 9.4% of applicants. According to The Huffington Post, Duke was the tenth toughest university in the United States to get into based on admissions data from 2010. The yield rate (the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend the university) is approximately 50%. For the class of 2015, 90% of enrolled students ranked in the top 10% of their high school classes; 97% ranked in the top quarter. The middle 50% range of SAT scores for the prospective students accepted to Trinity College of Arts and Sciences in Fall 2014 is 680–790 for verbal/critical reading, 700–800 for math, and 700–790 for writing, while the ACT Composite range is 31–35 For those accepted to the Pratt School of Engineering, the middle 50% range for the SAT is 700-780 for verbal/critical reading, 760-800 for math, and 720-800 for writing, while the ACT Composite range is 33-35. The average SAT score is 2240.
From 2001 to 2011, Duke has had the sixth highest number of Fulbright, Rhodes, Truman, and Goldwater scholarships in the nation among private universities. The University practices need-blind admissions and meets 100% of admitted students' demonstrated need. About 50 percent of all Duke students receive some form of financial aid, which includes need-based aid, athletic aid, and merit aid. The average need-based grant for the 2013–2014 academic year was nearly $39,275. Roughly 60 merit-based scholarships are also offered, including the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship, awarded for academic exc
Kingston was founded as Kingston Technical Institute in 1899. In 1930 the Kingston School of Art separated, later to become Kingston College of Art. Kingston was recognised as a Regional College of Technology by Ministry of Education in 1957. In 1970 it merged again with the College of Art to become Kingston Polytechnic, offering 34 major courses, of which 17 were at degree level.
Kingston University was granted university status under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. In 1993, Kingston opened the Roehampton Vale campus building and in 1995, Kingston acquired Dorich House.
The University has six halls of residence. Chancellors' and Walkden are based at the Kingston Hill campus. Middle Mill is adjacent to Knights Park campus, while Clayhill and Seething Wells are on opposite sides of Surbiton. Finally, there is Kingston Bridge House which is situated on the edge of Bushy Park at the Hampton Wick end of Kingston Bridge, London.
There are also contracted out halls of residence which are not owned by the university but licensed by them. IQ Wave halls were contracted due to Rennie being demolished to make way for a new education building at Kingston Hill.
The university operates a "headed tenancy" scheme in which the university sublets local properties to students from landlords.
In 2008, the BBC obtained e-mails circulated within Kingston's School of Music, relating to the opinions of an external examiner moderating the BMus course. The messages showed that her final report caused considerable concern within the department. The examiner was persuaded to moderate her criticism following contact from a member of the University's staff. The e-mails also detailed a plan to replace her (at the end of her term) with a more experienced and broad-based external examiner, a process which Kingston stressed breaks no rules relating to the appointment of such examiners. In October 2008, Peter Williams, Chief Executive of the UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), presented the agency's findings to a Parliamentary Select Committee charged with investigating standards in British higher education. Following an investigation of the allegations by a former University staff member that undue pressure was applied to the School of Music's External Examiner, QAA upheld all charges of wrongdoing, as alleged.
The Faculty of Business & Law has a number of specialist research units which cover the principal business disciplines. These research units include: Asia Business Research Centre, Business-to-Business Marketing Research Centre, Centre for Insolvency Law and Policy, Centre for Working Life Research, Consumer Research Unit, Marketing in New Contexts Group, Small Business Research Centre, Centre for Research in Employment, Skills & Society, Institute of Leadership & Management in Health.
The Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing was formed in summer 2011. The Faculty is composed of eight schools: Aerospace and Aircraft Engineering; Civil Engineering and Construction; Computing and Information Systems; Geography, Geology and Environment; Life Sciences; Mathematics; Mechanical and Automotive Engineering; and Pharmacy and Chemistry.
The School of Geography, Geology and the Environment hosts Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which was the very first degree of its kind.
The Faculty's teaching is split between undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Facilities at the Roehampton Vale campus including a Learjet 25, flight simulator, wind tunnel and automotive workshops including a range of vehicles and testing facilities.
The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as Berkeley, UC Berkeley, California or simply Cal) is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. It is the flagship campus of the University of California system, one of three parts in the state's public higher education plan, which also includes the California State University system and the California Community Colleges System.
It is considered by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as one of six university brands that lead in world reputation rankings in 2015 and is ranked third on the U.S. News' 2015 Best Global Universities rankings conducted in the U.S. and nearly 50 other countries. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) also ranks the University of California, Berkeley, fourth in the world overall, and first among public universities. Some department specifics include third in engineering, fourth in social sciences and first in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and life sciences. The university is also well known for producing a high number of entrepreneurs.
Established in 1868 as the result of the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, UC Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system and offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines.The University of California has been charged with providing both "classical" and "practical" education for the state's people. Cal co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Berkeley faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 72 Nobel Prizes (including 30 alumni Nobel laureates), nine Wolf Prizes, seven Fields Medals, 18 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships,20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. To date, UC Berkeley scientists have discovered six chemical elements of the periodic table (californium, seaborgium, berkelium, einsteinium, fermium, lawrencium). Along with Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley researchers have discovered 16 chemical elements in total – more than any other university in the world.Berkeley is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and continues to have very high research activity with $730.7 million in research and development expenditures in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014.Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb in the world, which he personally headquartered at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Faculty member Edward Teller was (together with Stanislaw Ulam) the "father of the hydrogen bomb". Former United States Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate Steven Chu (PhD 1976), was Director of Berkeley Lab, 2004–2009.
Berkeley is a large, primarily residential research university with a majority of enrollments in undergraduate programs but also offers a comprehensive doctoral graduate program. The university has been accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission since 1949. The university is one of only two UC campuses operating on a semester calendar, (the other is UC Merced). Berkeley offers 106 Bachelor's degrees, 88 Master's degrees, 97 research-focused doctoral programs, and 31 professionally focused graduate degrees. The university awarded a total of 7,526 Bachelor's, 2,164 Master's, and 1,264 Doctoral degrees in 2012.
