Dartmouth has long been considered a tough contender in the academic arena, but in a recent report on collegiate athletics by U.S. News & World Report, the College received a new honor -- recognition as one of the top-20 college sports programs in America.
Named to the magazine's athletic "honor roll," Dartmouth was recognized for excelling in the four areas evaluated; gender equality, number of varsity sports offered, win-loss record, and graduation rates among athletes.
Perhaps surprising those who think of Ivy Leaguers more as bookish scholars, Dartmouth was joined on the "honor roll" by four other Elite Eight schools -- Brown, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton.
Richard Folkers, director of media relations for U.S. News & World Report, emphasized the fact that the focus of the ranking was athletics and not academics, however.
"The basis for the ranking was purely athletics. Academics only contributed in terms of the graduation rates of the athletes," Folkers said.
In terms of gender equality, Dartmouth was the only Ivy League school making the top-20 list, where it ranked 15th in the nation. The percentage of athletes at Dartmouth who are female is just three-tenths of a percent less than the overall percentage of females in the student body.
With its 34 sports teams, Dartmouth also tied for seventh in the nation in terms of the number of varsity sports offered. Harvard topped the standings with 41 sports teams.
Undertaken in an attempt to evaluate the success of college sports programs beyond just win-loss records, Folkers cited the ranking as the first of its kind at U.S. News & World Report. The magazine has long undertaken annual publication of a widely-read -- and also widely-criticized -- set of rankings for American colleges and universities purportedly based on their strength as institutions of higher education.
"Every other ranking we have ever done has had a purely academic basis. This is the first time we have ever done a sports program ranking. In fact, I'm not sure that anyone has attempted something of this scope before," Folkers said.
Since Dartmouth and its peer institutions do not offer athletic scholarships, they do not report the graduation rate of athletes to the NCAA. Instead, the magazine cited other, unspecified data indicating that the Ivy League school have high athletic graduation rates as compared to other Division I schools.
In addition to the five Ivy League schools, institutions making the "honor roll" were Boston College, Duke, Georgetown, Lehigh, Penn State, Stanford and Villanova and the Universities of Connecticut, Hawaii-Manoa, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts-Amherst, Michigan-Ann Arbor, New Hampshire and Utah.
Schools with major NCAA infractions -- such as academic cheating among athletes or illicit cash payments to members of sports teams -- in the last decade were excluded from the ranking.
