For the second year in a row, Dartmouth ranked eighth in U.S. News and World Report's annual rating of national colleges and universities.
Out of an overall score of 100, Dartmouth scored 95.4, 1.4 points behind seventh ranked California Institute of Technology. Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities were rated the top three institutions again this year.
Admissions and Financial Aid Director Karl Furstenberg said he was pleased with Dartmouth's rating.
"We're in the top echelon of private universities in the country," said Admissions and Financial Aid Director Karl Furstenberg. He said he thinks Dartmouth should be higher but said he was very satisfied with Dartmouth's rank of fourth in the Ivy League and in the top six of non-technical colleges and universities.
The rankings are based on a school's rating in six categories: academic reputation, student selectivity, faculty resources, graduation rate, financial resources and alumni satisfaction -- a measure of alumni donations.
The ratings in each category are based upon statistical information and a survey of presidents, deans and admissions directors at about 1,400 accredited four-year colleges and universities.
The College ranked ninth in student selectivity, calculated from SAT scores and other admissions data from last year's freshmen class. Dartmouth ranked 10th in this category last year, which counts for 25 percent of the total rank.
Dartmouth, however, fell from 12th to 18th in faculty resources, a category worth 20 percent of the total rank and based on 1) the 1993-94 year student to faculty ratio, 2) the percent of full-time faculty with doctorate degrees, 3) the percentage of part-time faculty and 4) the 1993-94 average salary for all full-time faculty--undergraduate and graduate.
Furstenberg said he did not know why the College dropped so substantially in this category. But the magazine altered the way in which it calculates faculty salaries, relying on full time faculty rather than tenured faculty and including a cost of living adjustment.
For the second straight year, Dartmouth's academic reputation remained at 16. The rank counts 25 percent of the total rank.
Furstenberg cited three reasons -- time lag, graduate schools and the "star factor" -- for the College's relatively low rank in this category, which placed it tied for seventh in the Ivy League.
"Academic reputation is built over a long period of time," Furstenberg said, adding that the reputation is built upon "older images of Dartmouth" as a less intellectual and more social school.
He said the school has become more intellectual but its reputation has lagged behind.
Furstenberg also said schools with strong graduate programs tend to rank higher in this category. Johns Hopkins University ranked fourth in the category, a rating Furstenberg attributed to its strong medical school and not its undergraduate program. JHU was ranked 22nd overall.
In terms of the "star factor," Furstenberg said institutions with many Nobel Prize winning faculty members typical at large research universities tend to be ranked higher.
The College also dropped from 12th to 11th in the financial resources category. Whereas he described these categories as comparing "apples to oranges" he emphasized that the student selectivity category compared "apples to apples" because it does not penalize smaller schools for having fewer graduate programs.
In the alumni satisfaction category, a measure of the percentage of living alumni who donated money between 1992 and 1993, Dartmouth fell from first to third.
Dartmouth also fell from second to fifth in graduation rate.
