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[quote=Anonymous]If your kid only wants private and does not like the bigger publics with sports, then your kid needs to decide if they care about academics/peer mix more than Big Sports on campus, acknowledging that Duke is big basketball mostly. 
The only academically matched school with the same peer mix and with big sports is Northwestern. 
Close second are Stanford and Notre Dame. Vanderbilt does not have huge sports save the one big game that just happened, but is an academic match. 
If academic fit is most important, look at ivies. Penn is slightly more social than others, none are rah rah sporty. All have the right academic/peer mix for someone who wants a majority of super smarties like Duke has. So does Hopkins. 
If sports is more important than academics, and it has to me private, then you have to go down a few levels to Tulane and the like. 
Wake or USC are a great compromise: peers overlap UVA-level as far as smarts, so not top 15 but smarter than Tulane, yet sports are much more than the super-smart academic schools like ivies/Hopkins. 
If your kid is ED'g Duke make sure they have talked to current students, not people who went in the 80s and 90s: most do not go out more than one night a week once past the freshman orientation party cycles, more than half spend most of Saturday and Sunday studying. The average humanities course has hundreds of pages of reading per week, the known "weed out" stem courses no longer actually "weed out"(Cs are rarely given) but students who wish to score better than average on midterms need to expect to study several hours per week in addition to class time.
Many clubs are highly competitive and have cuts just like Ivies, Georgetown, many others. The typical student is involved in 2-3 clubs/EC and a campus job or research, in addition to a full course load. 
We have a kid at Duke and a niece at UNC. We live in NC. UNC is much more academically relaxed than Duke, more like Duke was in '91 when their parent graduated--niece did not get into Duke as a legacy and is now very glad they did not.

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