With the recent departure of Scholarship Adviser Marilyn Grundy and the hiring of Kristin O'Rourke to replace her, the College has an opportunity to take a long-overdue look at how effectively the scholarship advising office works. In the last three years, just one Dartmouth student has won an American Rhodes Scholarship, while 14 students from Harvard and six more from Duke were given the award. Over that same span, just two Dartmouth undergraduates were awarded Marshall Scholarships -- nowhere close to Stanford's mark of ten Marshall Scholars.
These numbers should come as no surprise when considering how ill-prepared the scholarship advising office is to do its job in the first place. The office currently employs O'Rourke and one other part-time adviser to process about 200 applications from 50 different applicants. It's easy to see that these numbers don't add up to the sort of individual attention that is required to effectively help students navigate the scholarship application process. The Committee on Graduate Fellowships can only do so much -- it is composed of professors who have enough to do as it is.
This a problem that requires immediate attention because, like it or not, score is being kept. The annual numbers of Marshall and Rhodes scholars are taken into account when publications like U.S. News & World Report rank the nation's undergraduate institutions. If Dartmouth is lagging behind Harvard and Stanford this much in these counts, the College's reputation for offering an unparalleled academic experience to its undergraduates is undermined.
The bottom line is that if the administration hopes to maintain Dartmouth's academic prowess, it needs to make the scholarship advising office a priority and employ enough people to effectively and efficiently advise scholarship applicants. This issue has been an open wound for far too long, and action must be taken to stop the bleeding.
