On Dec. 13, the College extended its first offers of admission to the Class of 2029, drawing from a pool of 3,550 early decision applications — Dartmouth’s sixth “early record pool” since 2017, Dartmouth News announced today.
This year, the College chose to withhold data on the number of admitted students and its acceptance rate “during the active admissions cycle,” according to the article. In a statement to The Dartmouth, College spokesperson Jana Barnello wrote that admissions outcomes will be released in late March after all acceptance letters have been issued.
The new policy — which has also been adopted by “several” peer institutions — aims to “de-emphasize the stress of Ivy League selectivity,” Dartmouth News wrote. In recent years, the College has seen record-low early decision acceptance rates — 17% for the Class of 2028 and 19% for the Class of 2027 — paired with a high number of applications.
“We consider each student within their own, individual context, so when we celebrate our admitted students at this important moment, it seems reductive to boil their talents, ambitions, intellectual curiosity and vision for joining our community down to an acceptance rate,” assistant vice president and dean of undergraduate admissions Kathryn Bezella said, according to Dartmouth News.
In addition to early decision applicants, 1,470 students applied through QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization that matches high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds with top colleges and universities. Last year, the College admitted 74 students from 1,477 applicants through the program.
“Our sustained volume in the early rounds is remarkable, and it was unexpected,” vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid Lee Coffin stated in Dartmouth News. “In 30 years as a senior admission officer, I have never seen two consecutive pools line up as closely as this year’s early decision and QuestBridge pools did with last year’s record volume.”
The Class of 2029 is the first to apply since Dartmouth reinstated the standardized testing requirement last February. The number of early applicants to Dartmouth has increased by 71% since 2019, the last year the College required standardized test results. This year, 95% of early decision admits scored “at or above the 75th-percentile of test-takers at their high school” on the SAT or ACT, the Dartmouth News article stated. Ninety-eight percent were ranked in the top 10% of their senior class, and a record-setting 22% are projected to graduate as either valedictorian or salutatorian.
The early decision pool is also Dartmouth’s first since joining the Students from Rural and Small Towns partnership last year. The partnership aims to support students from rural areas through increased funding and access to Dartmouth Bound and Dartmouth Dimensions. Fifteen percent of this cycle’s accepted students come from a rural background, according to Dartmouth News.
Overall, students in the early decision and QuestBridge pool hail from 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and 44 countries. Forty-five percent of domestic admits come from the South or West — a “recent trend,” according to Dartmouth News — while 44% reside in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. California, Florida and Texas represent “three of the top five states,” and 16% of students accepted via early decision and QuestBridge reside internationally.
Of early decision and QuestBridge admitted students, 18% are the first in their families to attend college, according to Dartmouth News. More than half of admitted students attend a public or charter high school, and 10% come from a high school where half or fewer of the graduates go on to attend a four-year college.
A quarter of admitted students qualified for a financial aid package with no parental contribution, while the “preliminary average scholarship” is a record $73,000. Last March, the College announced the largest scholarship bequest in its history, removing the parent tuition contribution for any undergraduate student with a family income less than $125,000 with typical assets. The average award for the Class of 2028 was $71,582, according to Dartmouth News.
Though the College declined to disclose the number of legacy admits in last year’s early decision announcement, this year’s legacy admission rate was slightly lower than in previous years. Eleven percent of accepted students have a Dartmouth graduate parent — down from 14%, 13% and 15% for the early decision Classes of 2027, 2026 and 2025, respectively.
“I will remember these applicants for the rest of my career,” Bezella said in Dartmouth News. “Their vivid writing, the specificity of their reasons for choosing us, the insights they offered about their own lives and perspectives — it was a pleasure to get to know them through this process, and it is exciting to be signing their acceptance letters this week.”
Regular decision applications are due Jan. 2, and students will be notified on March 27.
