I stopped in for a quick visit to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and yes, the gothic architecture is stunning. The chapel is particularly gorgeous; just walking down the aisle as a visitor, I was transported to "The Sound of Music, and felt like Maria - minus the stunning gown.

Duke is home to about 6400 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate students. It was established in 1924 by the Duke family, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which it still is today, although there's no religious feeling on campus whatsoever. Although the Duke family's tobacco empire funded this university, Duke was proud to become a smoke-free campus on July 1, 2020, and in 2007, set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2024.

While there are many schools and colleges at Duke, all undergraduates are either in the College of Arts and Sciences or the School of Engineering. The most popular majors here are Computer Science, Economics, Biology, Public Policy, and Psychology. Some really interesting majors are Ancient Religion & Society, Computational Media, Linguistics & Computer Science, Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Slavic & Eurasian Studies, Statistical Science, and Visual & Media Studies. Some majors one might not expect to find are Cinematic Arts, Classical Archeology. Classical Civilization, Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, Computational Media, Energy Engineering, and Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence.

With D1 athletics, an endowment of $11.6 billion, and a tremendous alumni network, what's not to love? Only the $80K+ price tag and 6% admission rate!