Despite some students' complaints, Dartmouth's Career Services compares favorably with its equivalents at many peer school in terms of its scope, per-student spending and counseling, according to studies and administrators at these other offices.
Also, recent administrative and publicity measures by Career Services have increased the number of Dartmouth candidates for national fellowships like the Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships.
"We were very impressed with Dartmouth," said Irene Hill, the operations director of Smith College's career development office, who visited Dartmouth as part of a survey study by her office.
According to a benchmark study of Dartmouth and 10 other schools done by University of Pennsylvania's Career Services, Dartmouth ranked after only Yale and Harvard in student-to-staff ratio and dollars spent per student.
Snapshot studies of graduating classes over the last several years reveal that Career Services found jobs for a significant portion of those employed at graduation. In the studies, provided by John Pryor, the College's director of undergraduate evaluations and research, over half of the graduating students who had received job offers at the time of graduation credited Career Services.
Mostly, offers were obtained through corporate recruiting.
However, Director of Career Services Skip Sturman pointed out that these were just snapshot studies.
The same studies showed that most Dartmouth students graduated with a job in fields classified by Pryor as "Business" -- including consulting and investment banking.
"Education" ranked a consistent but distant second, and "Public Relations," "Computer Science/Engineering" and "Science/Research" usually followed.
Monica Wilson, the assistant director of employer relations at Career Services, companies in business fields were able to recruit more people at earlier times in the year because they could better anticipate their hiring needs than other kinds of companies, had a larger budget for recruiting and had a more prominent human resources staff.
Students who felt they needed to get jobs early in their senior years were attracted to the big-name firms, said Wilson, and so they often missed opportunities at firms in fields that tended to recruit later and had less presence on campus -- for example, firms that did interviews by phone.
Changes at Career Services within the past two years have greatly boosted the number of Dartmouth students applying for national scholarships, according to an internal e-mail from Marilyn Grundy, who is responsible for both these applications and those for law schools.
The number of students applying for a Marshall grant has gone from three in 2001 to 15 this year; the number applying for a Rhodes scholarship has gone from nine to 18; and the number of Fulbright scholarship applicants from 27 to 51.
Grundy attributed the jump to a new pre-application process in the spring of students' junior years, which she said made students consider applying for these scholarships earlier.
She also listed other factors like increased outreach and marketing of winners from Dartmouth, which gives students "someone to emulate."
Plus, as Grundy put it, "the market stinks right now," leading many students to explore scholarships as an alternative to finding early employment.
Although they did not provide statistics, Grundy and Sturman both remarked that the number of Dartmouth students winning scholarships versus the number at other schools was either good or improving.
"Dartmouth is up there," said Grundy on the informal rankings she shared with other career departments.
"I think the trend is upward," said Sturman, but added "the competition is fierce -- we're not talking about many winners nationally."
"I think there are schools where there are even more dedicated resources put behind trying to identify and track incoming students and shepherd them through the process," admitted Sturman.
"Dartmouth doesn't track," he said, but Career Services instead tries to interest qualified students.
According to Sturman and officials at other college's career counseling offices, one of the differences at Dartmouth is that it houses a number of services under one roof that a typical college might spread out across its campus.
"My sense is that we provide a much broader array of services than comparable offices," said Sturman. He listed dozens of services off the top of his head and provided documents showing how Career Services had instituted new programs annually at an increasing rate.
Philip Jones, the director of Yale's career office, said in an email message that when he visited Dartmouth he was struck with the array of things going on and the focus of the office on expanding its functions.
Both he and Hill, the career official from Smith, admitted to taking ideas from Dartmouth back to their own offices, such as Career Services' use of electronically submitted resumes.
However, Hill pointed out that Dartmouth did not provide counseling for alumni, a service Smith and several other peer schools provide, according to a study of seven colleges' career offices provided by Carrie Hemenway, communications director of the Smith office.
Hill said Smith also provided more one-on-one counseling, in contrast to Dartmouth's focus on workshops.
