Dartmouth '04's may have been surprised to find they are not as alone on campus during this Summer term as they thought they would be.
Over 6,000 outsiders have or will be participating in sports camps, conferences and other, Dartmouth-sponsored programs this year, and most other Ivy League schools have summer programs as well.
Dartmouth programs on campus are predominately sports camps -- over half of the 77 individual sessions of programs on campus will be for sports camps.
Although the College does not sponsor the sports programs, Dartmouth athletic coaches and assistants run most of them.
According to Dave Jones of the Kinyon/Jones Tennis Camp, the camps are a way for Dartmouth coaches and especially assistants to supplement their incomes during the summer.
Jones moved his program to Dartmouth because both he and Chuck Kinyon already worked here. Many of the other, non-sports programs here are sponsored by Dartmouth departments, according to E.J. Kiefer, manager of the conferences and special events office.
For these programs, Dartmouth is a natural choice. The charismatic John Rassias, founder of the Rassias Foundation, said that the Dartmouth campus is part of the "magic formula" that has made his accelerated language program a success. "There's a mystique about this place," said Rassias.
The accelerated language program is attended by foreign students, government officials, sometimes even ambassadors. Rassias described it by saying, "basically we try to cram 100 hours of instruction in to 10 days."
Other, non-sports programs at Dartmouth include a debate camp, several business conferences, and Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth, a program that brings inner-city students to Dartmouth.
Most other Ivy League schools have sports programs during the summer, but they also have academic programs. These are aimed predominately at high school students.
Many of these academic programs offer the same courses that are available during the year to regular students, but during shorter sessions.
At Yale, for example, 120 different courses are offered for about 1200 students, half of them high school seniors and exchange students and half Yale students who take the classes for credit, according to Yale Dean Bill Whobrey.
Whobrey said this is one of the reasons Yale offers these programs, to allow Yale students another opportunity to get the credits they need to graduate.
Both Whobrey and Abby Elmer, the director of summer college at Cornell, admit that their colleges' names are major factors in attracting students. They also point out that one of the reasons the programs exist is to give students who are considering these colleges a chance to try them out.
Another reason is to give the experience of being at the college to those who would not necessarily get the opportunity otherwise.
Whobrey said that students' participation in summer programs did not affect their chances of admission, and Elmer said it would only be a factor in the sense that "it is another bit of information for colleges and Cornell."
Ivy League programs are usually selective in the students they admit to attend classes at the campuses, one of the reasons they also tend to be smaller than some other college's programs.
Dartmouth does not advertise the campus' availability during the summer, but it is still filled to maximum. Dartmouth also needs the summer camps and programs to keep the College open during the summer, according Kiefer.
Speaking about Dartmouth's dining and residence halls, Kiefer said that without summer programs, it "wouldn't be worth it to keep them open."
Dartmouth itself, however, does not make a profit off the many conferences and camps at Dartmouth, according to Kiefer. Instead, camps are simply billed for the expense of running and maintaining the numerous residence halls, dining halls and sports facilities.