As an international perspective applicant, Dartmouth is a bit of a black box. It’s an Ivy League, and one of the hardest colleges to get into in the United States, but they don’t share much data about the details. While some other Ivies breakdown their admissions data to give applicants insight into the odds, Dartmouth doesn’t. In this post, we’ll demystify Dartmouth and give international applicants the tools they need to stand out for admissions. First, though, let’s talk about what statistics are available.
Dartmouth is one of those schools that chooses not to share the U.S. vs. International student acceptance numbers in their Common Data Set report. This means that we can’t see how the international student acceptance rate compares to the acceptance rate for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. They have this data. They are just deciding not to share it. Why? Good question. It’s impossible to know precisely why they don’t make this data public except that, maybe, they aren’t hitting the numbers they want. So, they don’t share where they are at. But that’s all just us making an informed guess.
Now, let’s talk what we do know. The overall acceptance rate to Dartmouth was 5.4% for the fall of 2023, and they received nearly 10,000 international applications. That doesn’t help us in knowing what an international student is up against, though, as we don’t have the acceptance rate for international applicants in particular. Culturally, though, Dartmouth likes international students, so this shouldn’t be discouraging. Instead, applicants should focus on what they can control. And that is the point of this post.
Applying to an Ivy as an international student requires a winning strategy. Get Yours.
The best thing an international applicant can have when applying to Dartmouth is one-on-one help, but the next best is winning advice. Every year, we help international students get into the Ivies, and there are three steps we often wish our students had started before they even emailed up. It’s difficult, truly, to start these steps too early. So, start now.
Plan in Advance
We said to start now, and we would have loved if prospective international students started yesterday. Seriously. As an international applicant, you are inherently at a disadvantage. The school system isn’t tuned towards American college admissions. The extracurricular opportunities, like clubs and student groups, may be limited relative to what is commonly available at American high schools. All of that means that international applicants need to start plotting the future with more runway than a domestic applicant.
So, this means that beginning to work on a college strategy at 16, 15, or even 14 years old isn’t absurd. Instead, it’s smart. And you’ll see why in as we continue charting the steps international applicants need to be taking today.
Select Target Programs
Once an applicant is committed to this process and setting a plan, they need to pick a program, or programs, to target at Dartmouth. This is because simply focusing on the school isn’t enough. Dartmouth is a diverse, dynamic, and exciting learning environment. There is a lot going on at Dartmouth, and simply saying you want the university doesn’t really actually tell them anything about an applicant other than that they like the campus and community. What they need to know isn’t an applicant’s preference for a mountain environment. They want to know who the applicant is, what drives them, and what their passions are. And the best way to show that is by focusing in on a program at Dartmouth that embodies what the applicant is excited about.
Dartmouth offers more than 60 majors. Of those programs, the hard sciences and economics are very popular. Recently, the top five majors, in fact, were economics, government, computer science, engineering, and biology — in that order. That doesn’t mean that an international applicant should pick one of these programs, though. The most popular majors are big, so they have lots of room, and that can be a good strategy. But the most popular majors also have a lot of competition, because so many students are looking to pursue them.
At the same time, we know that Dartmouth wants more students for their humanities programs and what some applicants and their families might think of as “useless” majors because they don’t come with immediately obvious career trajectories (we disagree with the “useless” label, for the record). Because of this, we recommend that international applicants to Dartmouth either target the humanities, with majors like anthropology or classics, or pair a more popular major, like engineering, with a more niche major, like classical studies or a minor in global health.
Remember that an applicant is not committed to these major selections. Rather, they are suggestions of what one could do as a student. They also serve as something to frame an application around, or tune an applicant profile towards.
And selecting a program, or pair of programs, isn’t a one-and-done and walk away type of thing. The whole point of selecting a program is to give an applicant something to aim towards. The target program should be used to help direct course selections, especially electives when available, summer activities, and, of course, extracurriculars.
Build Enviable Extracurriculars
Ah, extracurriculars — the secret sauce of a strong Dartmouth application from an international student. This is because most international students don’t have significant access to extracurricular activities like clubs through school, or they have responsibilities to their family that limit the time they have to commit to developing other interests.
First, let’s make it clear that family responsibilities and employment are not just valid things to include on an application to Dartmouth, they are critical to include if they are significant aspects of an applicant’s life. But while they serve to provide context and depth to an application, they aren’t enough.
International applicants to Dartmouth should develop things that they do outside of school, like clubs, student organizations, internships, part-time jobs, or online classes, that emphasize the student’s interest in the field of their target programs.
If there aren’t programs that a student can plug into through their school, community, or network, we work with our students to start things. If it isn’t there already, build it!
Applying to Dartmouth as an international student benefits from planning, strategy, and careful action. Applicants need top scores and exceptional grades, that’s obvious, but they also need to craft an application specifically tuned towards their target Dartmouth program or programs. If a student wants to get in, the details matter. That’s where we can help.
If you want a winning strategy as an international applicant, contact us.