Duke, Durham Tech launch guaranteed transfer pathway for engineering students

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by The Chronicle. It is republished here with permission.

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The Duke community might just be getting a little bigger. 

The university is close to finalizing an agreement with Durham Technical Community College to guarantee admission into the Pratt School of Engineering for select community college students graduating with an Associate of Engineering degree.

Should Duke finalize the partnership, it would be the first formalized community college transfer agreement for full-time undergraduate students among universities in the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of Top 10 colleges and universities; it would also be one of the first guaranteed admission programs among elite private universities in the country.

The program would allow students to spend two years at Durham Tech before transferring to Duke, where they would study for three more years to complete a bachelor’s degree in engineering. The institutions plan to recruit their first cohort of students this fall. They would begin their journeys at Duke in fall 2028.

“There are any number of ways that Duke and Durham Tech work together to address community challenges and priorities,” Durham Tech President J.B. Buxton said. “The student transfer program is, in some ways, the last frontier of that … and creates a whole new opportunity for our students.”

Program to mirror UNC, NC State transfer agreements

The Duke-Durham Tech engineering agreement will open a selective guaranteed admissions pathway. Initial admission into the program will be competitive, with final selections made by Duke. Transferring to Duke will be contingent on students completing their associate degree and maintaining other minimum academic criteria.

The agreement is modeled off of existing partnerships between Durham Tech and other universities in the Triangle.

At a recent INDY Week event, Buxton pointed to numerous N.C. public universities that partner with local community colleges through the North Carolina Comprehensive Articulation Agreement, a statewide agreement allowing for the transfer of credits between public and private universities. Additionally, Durham Tech has agreements with 30 private colleges across the state that follow the terms of the CAA, but Duke is currently not one of them.

Jenny Wood Crowley, Duke’s associate vice provost for strategic enrollment management, noted the program’s resemblance to North Carolina State University’s C3 partnership, another pathway involving two years at a community college followed by three years at a university. Both Buxton and Crowley also reported that the agreement would closely resemble C-STEP, a transfer agreement between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina community colleges.

The initial class would likely be “a much smaller cohort” than C-STEP which, according to Buxton, averages around 25 students. However, Buxton and Crowley both signaled interest in future expansion, including opening pathways for students to transfer into fields beyond engineering. 

“I think we’ll learn a lot from this first phase. I definitely don’t think we’ll want to stop at engineering,” Buxton said. “Our goal is to create as many opportunities as possible for our students for their next step, and to do that at Trinity would be an important step.”

Presently, neither Pratt nor the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences accept transfer credit for courses taken at community colleges. According to Crowley, the articulation agreement provides a “new pathway into Duke” that will function separately from traditional credit transfer processes, focusing on preparing students over the span of their associate degree coursework.

Efforts focus on low-income, local students

The program will be focused on the local community, leaders from both Duke and Durham Tech say, adding that they believe the agreement reflects their ongoing investment in the Durham community.

Crowley noted that the program would target low-income students. But largely eligibility requirements, like North Carolina residency, still remain unclear.

“(The agreement) reflects Duke’s belief that talent is widely distributed, but opportunity is not,” Crowley wrote. “With the right structure and support, talented students from every background can thrive at the highest levels.”

Duke has already committed to making attendance tuition-free for North Carolina and South Carolina families making under $150,000 per year through the Carolinas Initiative, first announced in 2023. Buxton said that initiative would likely benefit most of the cohort in the transfer program. 

“We’ve aligned on the goal of creating a clear, well-supported pathway for talented, low-income Durham Tech students to continue their engineering education at Duke after completing their associate’s degree,” Crowley wrote.

Both institutions are exploring ways to provide financial support for the initiative. Crowley emphasized supporting students holistically, including through “substantial scholarships” and programs to help students build “academic confidence, faculty relationships, and community” before they transfer. Duke also plans to create a grant-funded staff position that would support students and the program.

“We’re an economic mobility institution … We want to partner with anyone who helps us achieve that for the students who come here and for the region,” Buxton said.