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Mike Cranny's avatar

Quote from your article: “304 undergrads test positive out of 6,542. 4.6% in a week.

45 grad students test positive out of 9,009. 0.5%. why this is so much lower is an interesting question to which i’m not sure i have a good answer.”

I have a good answer. You made a mistake in your numbers and there are not 9,009 graduate students, it’s more likely 900. I’ve never heard of a school with 50% more graduate students.

If I’m correct, then 4.6% is very close to 5.0%. What other numbers have you misconstrued?

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The Wiltster's avatar

Not sure I am reading your post correctly, or if I even understand it, but Duke has well over half of its total student population in graduate school. In fact, of about 16K total students, about 10K are in graduate and professional programs.

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Mike Cranny's avatar

I’m quoting the numbers in the article. Does Duke really have about 50% more graduate students than undergrads? It seems unlikely, what’s your source?

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The Wiltster's avatar

I do not know where you checked, but College Tuition Compare shows similar numbers to the actual Duke website. (The Duke site is hard to find actual numbers on, though.)

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Mike Cranny's avatar

I checked and came up with about 4,000 graduate students in Business, Law, Medicine, and Engineering, and Nursing.

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Joe's avatar

I'm not going to fact check Duke's own claims, but it's hard to think of the incentive they would have to lie about this. Here is one of the top results, a website *they publish*, called "Duke Facts". One of the facts is that they have 9,009 graduate students. The reason your number is so low is that you're obviously leaving out the humanities, social sciences, and most of the physical sciences. Not too complicated. https://facts.duke.edu/

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Mike Cranny's avatar

I used their web site. It could well be 9,000, so my point is incorrect.

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Joe's avatar

Well, thanks for being willing to update your priors. It's rare to find that. I should noted that technically it is "grad and professional students", just to be scrupulous, but when I got my PhD not so long ago, "grad student" generally included professionals unless otherwise specified. But the number of "grad students proper" (people getting PhDs) at Duke is very likely still in the several thousands, so even conservatively, it's an infection rate around one percent, much lower than undergrads. That said, I have no good answer to this puzzle.

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