In Croo songs, it seems like there is always some lyric about forgetting your SAT scores, or your general high school awkwardness because zomg! We're Dartmouth students now! Yet, when the trips high dies down and you've uploaded the last of your Orientation pre-game pics to your Facebook (10FallinginlovewithDartmouth:) ), you may have found that where you attended high school is having some effect on your Dartmouth experience. And maybe even that being awkward doesn't stop in high school: "Uh, hi are you a brother? What's the line? Fifths? Thanks, man."
Fifty five percent of the Class of 2014 attended public school and 31.4 percent received a private education, while 6 percent went to a parochial school and 7.1 percent is listed as "other." More notably, 90.3 percent of the class of 2014 graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. You can easily see that Dartmouth recruited the best and the brightest. Yet, these students hail from 816 different high schools, where being in the top 10 percent of the class could mean many different things and can lead to a variety of academic and social experiences, especially during the first year at Dartmouth.
According to Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris, the four schools with the most matriculated students in the past 10 years are Stuyvesant High School of New York City, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va, Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy of Andover, Mass.
Besides the wide differences among those four, the other 812 schools present equally large contrasts.
Coming from a New England boarding school (where I was a day student), Dartmouth reminds me of high school in many ways, except I don't have to ask a door adviser's permission every time I want to enter a member of the opposite sex's room and there's no 11:45 p.m. curfew on Saturday nights. Overall, the transition to Dartmouth wasn't too jarring I knew how to handle lots of work, and I had already seen and understood what it was like to live away from home from the experiences of my boarder friends. I might have had a different experience, however, if I had attended the public school in my hometown.
Andrea Baer '13 was valedictorian at her public high school in Troy, N.Y., where average SAT scores were 480 in Math, 430 in Writing and 450 in Critical Reading. Her graduating class was about 180 students.
"At one point we had over 200, but once we turned 16 I think a bunch of kids dropped out because they were allowed to," she said.
The only person from Baer's school who had ever gone to Dartmouth was her sister, who graduated last June.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Drew Jankowski '13, who attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. Exeter is a school that has "consistently sent the most matriculating students" to Dartmouth, according to Laskaris. There are 10 Exeter alumnae in the Class of 2013, and about 40 currently enrolled at Dartmouth, Jankowski said.
Nina Boal, '14, who attended the competitive public West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North in Princeton Junction, N.J., said academically, "there's a lot of work here and it's not easy by any means, but it's not a big wake-up call or anything."
"It was pretty normal for students to be in at least three AP classes," Boal said of her high school.
It was also not uncommon for students to take science and math classes at Princeton University once they had exhausted options at the high school.
Students also said they were affected by the varying levels of competition within extracurriculars in their high schools.
"An advantage of being in a public school like that is that it's easy to join activities and stand out in them, which I don't find at Dartmouth," Baer said. "I wasn't prepared for the competitive nature of joining things you love."
Dartmouth also offers more freedom for students than most high schools both in terms of the actual activities offered and the atmosphere.
"My high school experience all led up to me getting into Dartmouth," Emily Shaw '12 said. "Now I can do whatever I want. It was all resume-building, trying to be well-rounded so I could create opportunities for myself. In high school I didn't take art even though I was really interested in it because I wanted to build up my AP repertoire, so I didn't have time to take classes. Now I'm an art major."
But none of the students interviewed said that they have not noticed social differences in those who went to a public versus a private school.
"It doesn't affect my social life because my private school friends are just as compatible with me as my public school friends are," Baer said.
At Dartmouth the mix of public and private schools is kept fairly consistent.
"There are usually 55-60 percent from public schools, 35-40 percent from public schools and the remaining 5 or so percent from parochial schools," Laskaris said.
There are not noticeable divides between those who went to public and those who went to private schools. Jankowski did note, however, that because so many alumni from Exeter matriculate at Dartmouth, he arrived already knowing a fair number of upperclassmen, which he had as a resource particularly freshman Fall.
"I could say hey, how do I do this or could you help me find this," Jankowski said.
Like he mentioned, the time when what high school you went to probably mattered the most is during freshman Fall, when you are adjusting to college life and glomming onto any friends you can find. This is the time when the whole "Oh! Our boarding schools were lacrosse rivals!" may be most prevalent.
But, once we have all smelled each other's four-days-without-a-shower aroma during trips, sunk our first cups, handed in that final freshman seminar paper and perhaps attended our first Wednesday night meetings, our high school backgrounds cease to matter. We go to Dartmouth now.
