When Alex Cook '09 told his friends in Tennessee he was going to attend Dartmouth, many of them did not recognize the name. "People would say, 'What college are you going to?' and I would say Dartmouth and there would be an awkward silence," Cook said.
Cook is not alone in having to occasionally explain to people that Dartmouth is, in fact, an Ivy League school. But if Dartmouth students sometimes feel under-appreciated, many students at Cornell University seem to be in the throes of a full-blown identity crisis.
A coalition of undergraduates there recently formed an "image committee" to restore what they see as Cornell's fading reputation as one of the nation's best universities. The overarching goal of the committee is to raise Cornell's standing in the U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings. Cornell is currently ranked 13th and within the Ivy League, only Brown University is ranked lower. Dartmouth is tied with Columbia University for ninth.
However, Karl Furstenberg, the College's Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, cautioned against placing too much emphasis on rankings.
"I think we spend too much time comparing ourselves to the few other places in the same category," he said. "We recognize that the rankings are a factor in the choices that many students make but we are not doing anything that enhances our ranking for rankings' sake."
Does Dartmouth need an image overhaul to bring it to the top of the Ivy pecking order?
Based on an article last week from The New York Times describing Cornell's image committee, the answer might be yes. The article mentions that Cornell is often perceived as a "country cousin to Harvard [University], Yale [University] and Princeton [University]." No mention is made of Dartmouth.
Similarly, The Fiske Guide to Colleges for 2006, repeatedly refers to Harvard, Princeton and Yale as the "Ivy League's Big Three." "Yes, there's a hierarchy [in the Ivy League] and it has existed for hundreds of years so these things change slowly," Furstenberg said.
The Fiske Guide also lists overlap schools for each college. According to the book, every Ivy League school overlaps with Harvard, Yale or Princeton, and most overlap with all three. No Ivy League school overlaps with Dartmouth, though.
That in itself may have little to do with Dartmouth's stature in the Ivy League and more to do with innate differences between Dartmouth and the other Ivies. For instance, students looking at Columbia in the heart of New York City may not consider a school in rural New Hampshire.
Additionally, many of the underlying reasons for Cornell's image committee are irrelevant at Dartmouth.
Cornell has 8,000 more undergraduates than Dartmouth, and it has the highest acceptance rate in the Ivy League. Since three of its seven undergraduate schools are run by New York State, image committee members feel that Cornell is sometimes viewed as a state school, not an elite, private institution. Since none of Dartmouth's schools is controlled by New Hampshire, it does not have that problem.
While many Cornell image committee members felt that few students owned clothing emblazoned with the school's name, the same does not hold true at Dartmouth.
"The most popular items we sell are the block letter Dartmouth things," said Stanton Selby, who oversees mail orders at the Dartmouth Co-op. "Even the stuff we sell that just has a 'D' on it doesn't sell as well as things that say the word Dartmouth."
