This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Special Issue.
On April 2, 2024, The Dartmouth staff published a book titled “50 Dartmouth Application Essays That Worked: Crafting a Compelling Ivy League Admissions Essay” — a selection of successful application essays that “paved the way for students’ admission into the prestigious halls of Dartmouth College,” according to the book’s blurb. The D’s business team is now seeking submissions for a second edition. While I am not particularly proud of the essays in my application, I was initially considering submitting them to the collection — who wouldn’t want a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card? — until I reflected more on the book’s somewhat concerning implications. I strongly believe that the book’s concept is morally questionable and perpetuates a disturbing message about both the College and the admissions process in general. College admissions are difficult and confusing, and students have grown increasingly concerned with prestige rather than fit — often leading to obsessions with notoriously inaccessible colleges with ridiculous acceptance rates, Dartmouth being one of them. Books like this one simply further that sense of inaccessibility by setting unrealistic standards and presenting only a fraction of the whole picture.
In response to an FAQ titled “How do I impress Dartmouth with my essays?” the Dartmouth Admissions website encourages students to “illustrate” their personalities. It tells applicants to show the College the “intangibles” — the qualities that make them them — and give voice to all their dreams and passions. If every applicant and every application is in fact different — and Dartmouth is seeking unique, special people — is it not counterintuitive and concerning for The Dartmouth newspaper to show, or better still sell, “essays that worked?” By showing people what “worked,” the book may be leading applicants to think inside the box and creating the impression that there is a right way to approach the college application process.
The truth of the matter is that there is no right or wrong way to put yourself out there. If there is a secret “right way,” it is certainly not communicated through the book of successful essays. It goes without saying that of all the 1,710 people Dartmouth accepted into the Class of 2028, no two students have had the exact same lived experience or write with the exact same voice. Moreover, it’s important to note that these essays are not randomly selected — they are curated by the business staff of the newspaper. This implies that prospective applicants are getting the cream of the crop: the most well-written, the quirkiest, the most outlandishly creative essays that could only be written by future Frosts and Kalings and, perhaps most concerningly, the kind of essays that get you to give up the Ivy dream before you even write your first word.
I also take issue with the way in which the book — by not shedding light on either the other factors that play a role in or the subjectivity of the admissions process — seems to convey a message that college essays are the be-all, end-all of the admissions process. In reality, they constitute only a small portion of the whole. An applicant’s GPA, test scores, extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation hold equal, if not greater, importance. For the book to simply disregard these other aspects of a student’s application is alarming.
Additionally, the importance of sheer luck in the admission process cannot be overstated. As a current student, I know that I am in the 5.4% of accepted applicants for the Class of 2028, not necessarily because I am intrinsically better than the thousands of others who got rejected, but because my admissions reader thought that I would be a good fit at Dartmouth — or a thousand other reasons that I can’t begin to guess. The process is too subjective, too random and too unpredictable for anyone to say, with certainty, that this would work and that would not — including the staff of America’s oldest college newspaper. I can say with some certainty that if you were to take an essay from one of the books and make every admissions reader read it, there’s a good chance that the decision would not be unanimous.
While the College has no jurisdiction over the newspaper, and the book does mention this, we need to realize that for a prospective student, there probably appears to be very little difference between a book published by the staff of The Dartmouth and Dartmouth College itself. The Dartmouth should be conscious of the kind of damaging messaging its book is putting across. Instead of being a tool for prospective students, it very well may be perpetuating a damaging cycle of self doubt, sense of inaccessibility and inauthenticity. We’ve made the mistake once — let’s not do it again.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
