Two world wars, a cold war, the civil rights movement and a number of national publications have all played a part in shaping Dartmouth's admissions process into what it is today.
The College implemented its first formal application process in 1921, an act that according to some, started the trend in selective admissions which survives today.
Prior to 1921, the pool of applicants was too small to warrant selective competition. Before then, the admissions office focused mainly on entrance requirements -- applicants needed only maintain certain grades, take a required course load, and attend a College-accredited school to gain admission.
"There was a time prior to World War II when admissions didn't exist," Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said. "People from a certain class of society went to schools like this."
But throughout the past 75 years, the College has altered its admissions procedures to reflect the changing times and attitudes of the country.
"Over the years there began to be much more attention paid to having a diverse entering class and to having classes that were representative of the population," Director of Athletics Dick Jaeger said. Jaeger started in the admissions office as assistant director in 1964 and was director of admissions in the 1980s before leaving in 1989.
Selecting the selective process
Prior to 1933, the College maintained a list of secondary schools from which it accepted students, but by 1945 the College developed a selection process similar to the one it uses today.
Some schools on the College's list during the 1920s included Philips Academy in Andover, Philips Academy in Exeter and the Horace Mann School in New York City. If feeder schools sent the College too many students who performed poorly, they risked being removed from the list.
The major event of 1921 was the institution of the Selective Process of Admissions. In light of the growing number of applications, the Selective Process of Admissions first recognized the need for a more objective admissions process.
"Before World War I, admission to college had been a relatively simple matter of demonstrating to college registrars that the applicant had acquired the prescribed intellectual tools for undertaking a college curriculum," stated the Committee on Admission and the Freshman Year in 1950.
After just two years, the College hailed its Selective Process as a "widely copied ... radical and progressive step," according to the Committee on Admission in 1923.
According to the 1950 report of the Committee on Admission and the Freshman Year, the Selective Process of Admissions "is believed to have been the first of such competitive procedures of college admission, now in use in almost all American colleges."
The admissions office got its first taste of what applicants would do to gain acceptance to the College in 1925 when one applicant completely forged his secondary school records and three other applicants received help from their school in falsifying admissions information, according to the 1925 report of the Committee on Admission. All four students and the school were separated from the College.
In 1933, the College abandoned the "accredited list of Dartmouth preparatory schools" that could no longer represent the ever broadening field of applicants, according to the Committee on Admissions' report that year.
At this time, the College added three new questions to its application, which inquired about students' "religious background," their "racial inheritance" and whether they planned to ask for financial aid.
The 1933 report of the Committee on Admission stated these questions were necessary to preserve "the traditional flavor of an old New England college campus."
In its 1936 report, the Committee on Admissions first discussed the extent to which it should use scores from the new Scholastic Aptitude Test in admissions decisions.
"We have at present no notion of requiring the tests to be taken in April or making it a compulsory feature of our scholastic requirements," the Committee on Admissions' report read.
A season of changes
With the development and use of nuclear weapons, World War II brought many changes to the world as a whole, but also to the College's admissions process.
"We have been warned by many serious people that the true 'cold war' is the war of education," concluded the Committee on Admissions in 1953, when it recommended the College increase the minimum English and foreign language requirements for applicants.
Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco worked in the Admissions Office during the 1980s, and was a graduate student at the College in 1974.
Turco said the growing threat of nuclear war increased the national emphasis on education. Turco said the classes of 1966, 1967 and 1968 were particularly adept in math and science.
"We were taught math and science like you wouldn't believe."
At the peak of World War II, the College faced a vanishing pool of applicants, which was soon followed by a surge of applicants as soldiers returned home from the war.
The Committee on Admissions and the Freshman Year in 1948 referred to a "new postwar level of competition for admission, which finds the number of applications more than doubled over prewar applications."
Furstenberg said the addition of veterans into the applicant pool changed the character of the classes admitted immediately after the war.
"All of a sudden there were students who had real world experience," Furstenberg said, as well as students who "were a bit older."
Another factor in the post-war admissions process was a growing national awareness of the College's existence.
Part of that awareness came from national media attention, including negative press stemming from a letter then-College President Ernest Hopkins wrote.
In August 1945, the New York Post printed an article alleging the College discriminated against Jews in its admission process. The article quoted parts of Hopkins' letter, which it claimed showed the discriminatory views of the College.
The New York Post article took a sentence where Hopkins called Dartmouth a "Christian college" out of context to prove his bias.
But the letter actually explained Hopkins' refusal to institute quotas in the admissions process.
The faculty asked the Committee on Admissions to declare that it did not discriminate on the basis of religion to counter the negative press, but the committee refused because the declaration "would be interpreted by the public ... to mean that racial or religious discrimination has been practiced at Dartmouth College."
Furstenberg said the College made more of an effort to promote religious diversity after this national attention.
Rounding out applications
By 1945, the application process had evolved to become much the same process it is today.
The increase in veteran and other non-high school student applications after the war forced admissions officers to create a more equitable admissions process.
The Committee on Admissions' 1945 report explained the standardized process. "The applicant himself fills in a blank detailing his personal history, likes and dislikes, plans and ambitions, scholastic activities and participations," the report stated.
The College also considered the alumni interview, as well as recommendations from school teachers and principals. The personal essay in 1945 asked the applicant to describe significant experiences and why the applicant wished to attend the College.
In 1951, the College first required SAT results from applicants and began to require three achievement test results in 1958.
In 1958, the College also implemented the early decision program to combat growing competition and attrition rates among other colleges, which had implemented early decision and early action programs.
That year, about 5 percent of the 2,988 applications were early decision and 91 of the 1,487 total acceptances were early decision candidates. The final class size was 842 students.
Noting the growing competition in college admissions, the College first recognized attrition as a serious problem in 1949.
"There has been another increase in the number of men offered admission here who have matriculated elsewhere," the Committee on Admissions' 1949 report stated.
The Committee on Admissions and the Freshman Year in 1952 also noted the growing competition in college admissions.
"There is much concern among the colleges about the continued increase of multiple applications and of the tendency to collect college admission and scholarships like trophies," the Committee stated in its annual report.
Waiting lists became prominent at most selective colleges during this era, and the influence of alumni relations in admissions decisions was decreased.
Admissions starts recruiting
As America experienced the civil rights movement, the admissions office increased efforts to admit more diverse classes.
Minority recruiting had been an issue since 1960. A Board of Trustees subcommittee on admissions pointed out the importance of recruitment practices.
"There are relatively few Negro applicants at the present time and if it were decided to increase that element of the cross section pointed recruitment would be the means rather than simply including a preference in the admissions policy," the subcommittee stated.
The subcommittee also addressed what it considered to be overrepresented groups.
The report used Jewish students as an example, stating that, "for several years, the Admissions Office has tagged the folders of candidates presumed to be Jewish on the basis off their names or information furnished by the candidate gratuitously, as it does for other special groups about whom some people express concern."
In and beyond the 1960s
Although the College's charter prohibits discrimination, it was not until the 1968 McLane Report that the College made significant efforts to promote diversity at the College.
Following the Dartmouth College case, which kept the College from becoming the University of New Hampshire, the College "became a club and to join the club the people had to be just like all the members of the club. And this of course was true right into the '60s," said Al Quirk, who worked in the Admissions Office starting in 1964 and eventually retired as Dean of Admissions in 1993.
Quirk said the impetus for major changes in the second half of this century was a 1968 report that outlined the past and future of minorities at the College.
"It started with the McLane Report which was sort of a blueprint for the direction the institution was to go," Quirk said. Faculty, students and alumni "spent a great deal of time researching what the institution should do," according to Quirk.
"It developed a guideline for the groups which would be targeted -- Native Americans and African-Americans," Quirk continued. The guideline called for increased representation of those minorities to create a more diverse campus.
He said the College targeted these two groups and waited to evaluate the results of the guideline before looking toward other groups.
The report also led the College to establish summer programs at the College for children from predominantly black inner cities "with the understanding that if they did well they could matriculate as regular students," Quirk said.
Not everyone had faith in the earliest efforts to increase minority representation at the College.
"In the beginning, the notion that previously white institutions were indeed trying to increase the number [of minorities] was met with some skepticism," Quirk said.
But with time, students and parents "recognized that this was indeed for real and it was going to last and that the institution would indeed welcome the students even though it was a primarily white state and white community," he said.
Coeducation
Another rising national movement in the 1960s, the notion of gender equity, also manifested itself in the College's admission process in the early 1970s.
John Kemeny became president of the College in 1971 and appointed a committee which presented a plan for year-round operation that incorporated coeducation.
Year-round education increased the number of students attending the college, allowing women to enter without decreasing the number of men.
The first women entered the school in the fall of 1972.
"A faculty member put it this way," Turco said, "When Dartmouth first coeducated, it added a few women, stirred the pots," and slowly kept adding small numbers of women.
Only eight years later the pots were completely stirred.
"The biggest thing that happened in the '70s was in [late 1979 and early 1980] we went to sex blind admissions," Turco said.
The continuing process of coeducation includes other milestones, Turco said, such as when "more living classes are coed than single sex. You're noting the markers."
"The big thing was this year getting to parity for the Class of '99," Turco said. "It was everything we had hoped for since 1972."
Many of the first women admitted to the College after coeducation was implemented were women who had already attended the College as part of an exchange program, Turco said.
In addition, women were added gradually to the College, in increasing percentages of the total class mix, Turco said. For these reasons, it was not until the late 1970s that the College's problems with the admission of women began getting national attention.
"They had no female admissions officers when they launched the coed program," Turco said.
Turco said some men resented women at the College because, "There were a lot of men who had been rejected, scorned" due to the ratio of women to men
"For every one woman there were three men," Turco said. "The numbers worked against them."
The College's admission process became sex-blind in 1980, after years of gradually adding larger percentages of women to each class.
Although the College's first women face "a wall of resistance to change," Turco said, "There's been so much change it's incredible."
Courting a diverse community
As the College began to admit an increasingly diverse student body, it also sought ways encourage these students to apply to the College.
"The first thing we did was to put women on the admissions staff," Turco said.
The College sent these admissions officers to talk to prospective applicants, and educated older alumni about the changes at the College.
"We were actively recruiting women," Turco added. "What we did was ... encourage them. We were actively looking to increase the diversity of our class."
But sometimes these efforts were thwarted.
"1979 was a time you just didn't want to open the paper as an admissions officer, because every time we opened the paper you felt there would be something in there about either the way students of color were treated at the College or the way women were treated at the College," Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia previously told The Dartmouth. Sateia worked as an admissions officer from 1974 to 1988.
Sateia described one instance when a gathering was planned for black alumni and prospective students, "and literally a couple days before we had a racial incident on campus." Although they had expected a large turnout, Sateia said, "as it was there were very few people that attended."
"The top students have choices and when they're trying to make up their minds. Sometimes these factors will play into and that makes the job of an admissions officer that much more challenging," Sateia said.
In addition to women, the College was examining the admissions' rates of other minorities in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Jaeger said recruiters from the College visited areas with high concentrations of minorities whose representation they wished to increase.
The College increased the number of black faculty members and expanded the number of black alumni it sent to recruit applicants, he said.
The College increased recruiting efforts to adapt to the dramatic changes in the admissions office, according to Furstenberg.
"Recruiting has become more aggressive, more sophisticated," Furstenberg said.
The College began broadening the number and types of schools it courted with. In addition, students were encouraged to visit Hanover whenever possible.
"We started the hosting program," Turco said. "We really tried to formalize the tours."
Quirk said bringing students to campus "was very successful."
Turco said the College also brought high school guidance counselors to the campus, in an effort to dispel any incorrect notions they had about the College. "We reintroduced" the school to the counselors, she said.
Dartmouth in the media, again
Three decades after the College had been in the headlines for its alleged discriminatory admissions policy, the admissions office was again faced with national media attention.
"The corporate student body at Dartmouth were wonderful guys," Turco said. "It was the bad stuff that got the press."
"We had to combat that image" in the admissions office, Turco said.
"People argue that any kind of national attention might be good," Turco said, but the attention the College received during this period was not necessarily "the kind of attention you want to draw."
In 1986, the College made the news when a group of students destroyed shanties that students had constructed on the Green to protest the College's investment practices.
In early 1986, the Classes of 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1989 were on campus. "Those were classes," Turco said, with a large representation of diversity. "There was a critical mass of women."
"Some people on campus wondered if the College would enroll a 'different type of class' because of the widespread, negative publicity Dartmouth received during 1985 and 1986," Turco wrote in an e-mail message. "Later on, after the Class of 1990 arrived and moved through the four year sequence, people often remarked that the class was, in fact, different."
Turco said she could not elaborate on the differences people perceived.
However, "the stereotype of our being a conservative environment" began in 1986 with the entering Class of 1990, Turco said. "'90 was a different class. Each class has a different personality."
