Adam Levine '08, a Rhodes scholar currently studying for a Ph.D at the University of Oxford, has noticed something about the composition of his current group of peers.
"Being on the ground at Oxford, I'm aware that there are very few Rhodes Scholars from Dartmouth," Levine told The Dartmouth this week.
Levine's observation belies a larger numerical trend at the College: In recent years, fewer Dartmouth students have been awarded Marshall, Mitchell or Rhodes scholarships than students at many of the College's peer institutions.
The 84 students from institutions across the United States who will receive the three scholarships will be announced in late November.
Dartmouth currently has one finalist for the Marshall Scholarship, which funds students to study for at least two years at any university in the United Kingdom, and two finalists for the Mitchell Scholarship, which gives students a grant to study for one year in Ireland, according to assistant dean for scholarship advising Kristin O'Rourke. The American Rhodes Trust will selected finalists for its scholarships in the coming days, O'Rourke said.
Dartmouth lags behind many of its Ivy League peers in terms of both the number of applicants to these programs and the number of eventual winners, according to officials from Dartmouth and other Ivy League institutions.
In the past 10 years, Dartmouth has had four Rhodes scholarship winners, according to the American Rhodes Trust web site. That number puts Dartmouth in sixth place in the Ivy League in terms of number of Rhodes scholarships won in the last 10 years, tied with the University of Pennsylvania and besting only Cornell University.
Dartmouth typically has 10 to 12 applicants each year for the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships, O'Rourke said. In contrast, about 50 to 55 students from Harvard University apply for the awards each year, according to Harvard fellowships director Paul Bohlmann.
Dartmouth's small applicant pool and corresponding low numbers of scholarships, however, both appear to be recent trends: Dartmouth had 10 winners over the decade from 1950 to 1959, according to the Rhodes Trust web site.
And, since the Rhodes Scholarship program was founded in 1902, 60 American winners have come from Dartmouth, according to the Rhodes Trust web site, which put the College in sixth place overall.
Fellowship winners and Ivy League administrators attributed Dartmouth's current under-representation to several factors, including Dartmouth students' diverse interests and corporate-focused career ambitions.
"My impression of Dartmouth is it's a finance feeder school," Levine said. "As to the point of why apply to Oxford: Why would you? You don't gain anything by putting your career on hold. The degree of higher education one would pursue when going for a finance career is an MBA. While Oxford has very many good things going for it, it does not have a particularly good business program. It's American schools that have good MBAs."
Former Student Body President Travis Green '08, who spent a year studying at University College, Dublin after winning a Mitchell Scholarship, said that there may also be institutional differences that account for Dartmouth's relatively small number of applicants.
"You have a set [of schools] that always does really well," Green explained. "The set is Georgetown [University], Harvard and the military academies. Those schools have an amazingly intense process. They divert a huge amount of resources into gaining and winning those scholarships. So Dartmouth's effort, while very good, doesn't have the capabilities of those institutional efforts. The kids in the military academies are selected from freshman year, and [faculty and administrators] start pressing them."
Bohlmann said that Harvard does not try to "identify" good candidates, but does "advertise the daylights" out of the scholarships.
"It's all sort of passive in the sense that the information is out there, and we hope people will self-identify and come forward," Bohlmann said.
Dartmouth similarly prefers to advertise and then let students make the decision to apply, O'Rourke said.
"If people have those skills and those qualities and that they desire, then they should be able to put themselves forward," she said. "We do try to do as much advertising as possible to try and get the word out."
