Dear Members of the TIP Community,
COVID-19 has disrupted every part of our lives, from our health and education to our mobility and our livelihoods. Nothing has been untouched, and we have all had to make difficult and painful choices.
Today, we are writing to inform you about one of those difficult choices that Duke has had to make. The pandemic-induced closure of Duke TIP’s Summer Studies residential programs on our main campus in Durham and at colleges across the country in 2020 and likely again in 2021 has fundamentally disrupted the business and financial models that have long supported the TIP organization.
At the same time, the pandemic has also led Duke to accelerate a review of all precollege academic programs. A key strength of Duke has been its ongoing ability and willingness to innovate. The pause in operations across a range of precollege academic programs has given us an opportunity to step back and assess how best to serve students in a post-pandemic world. Based on this review, Duke will be creating a new unit in the Office of Academic Affairs to better align the existing important and diverse precollege activities with Duke’s current educational priorities and operational practices. Students served by Duke TIP will be a principal focus of this unit, which will oversee all our precollege programs and ensure they meet the highest standards of quality, reflect the best practices in education and are tightly linked with Duke’s extraordinary academic community.
As a result of this change, Duke TIP will not be offering programming (including the Academic Talent Search) for the remainder of 2020 through spring 2021 as we go through this transition and re-envision how to best serve all precollege learners. We look forward to resuming our activities next summer with a new and exciting slate of online courses on a wide range of topics—including artificial intelligence, coding, financial markets and pandemics, among others—taught by Duke faculty and graduate students and using the latest innovations in online education. As we redesign our precollege and talented offerings, we will not resume the talent search with above-level testing, but will instead be looking at new ways to identify students and facilitate their access to these enrichment programs. We will continue to work with families who participated in prior talent searches to provide the promised programs, research, and resources, which will remain available on this site.
We know that the suspension of Summer Studies and Talent Search will come as a disappointment to you, and it is a disappointment to us as well because we know how valued it has been by generations of TIPsters. But we are equally excited about the opportunity to update and modernize our programming, and to build on the innovative, enriching and challenging educational experiences that have made TIP such a transformative resource for more than three million students over the past 40 years. We will provide more information on this transition in the weeks ahead, as well as opportunities for students, parents and alumni to remain engaged.
Thank you for your continued support of Duke University.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Francis
Executive Vice Provost