Which offers more flexibility for undergraduate students: MIT or Duke?

Duke is especially appealing for someone whose interests may move between substantially different fields, such as public policy and computer science, psychology and visual media, or economics and global health. Trinity students can take many courses across Duke’s undergraduate schools, though some professional-school courses have prerequisites or enrollment limits.

MIT is highly flexible for a student who expects their exploration to remain largely connected to STEM. Students enter without being locked into a major, and changing majors is common and usually administratively straightforward. MIT’s General Institute Requirements ensure that every student takes substantial math, science, humanities, arts, and social-science coursework, while electives, minors, second majors, and interdisciplinary programs can support combinations such as computer science and economics or biology and political science.

The tradeoff is that MIT’s required scientific and technical foundation, along with the pace and sequencing of many majors, can make a late pivot into an unrelated field feel less open-ended. Its humanities and social-science offerings are serious, and students may cross-register for selected courses at Harvard and Wellesley, but the undergraduate experience is still centered on a technical institute.