This article is featured in the 2026 Winter Carnival Issue.
In recent years, Dartmouth has received tens of thousands of applications and typically notifies regular decision applicants in late March. The Dartmouth recently sat down with Dartmouth’s admissions and financial aid dean and local college consultants to understand the bigger changes shaping Dartmouth admissions.
The College received 28,230 undergraduate applications to the Class of 2029, a decrease of 3,427 applications from the previous year and the lowest number of applications in the past five years. The 2022-23 cycle saw 127 more applicants than the most recent cycle and is the second lowest number received in the past five years, according to a Jan. 15 report from chief financial officer Scott Frew to Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees.
The College reinstated the testing requirement for the Class of 2029 in 2024, which vice president and admissions and financial aid dean Lee Coffin said may have contributed to a decline in applications.
“[Test-optional policies] generated bigger pools, but I don’t think they thought they were getting in,” Coffin said. “When we restored testing, the pool came down a bit, as we knew it would.”
College admissions consultant Nancy Steenson, who operates out of Danville, N.H., said that standardized exams are “becoming more important” in college admissions because they have revealed weakening math and reading skills among high school students.
“We’re seeing more and more grade inflation in high schools, where everyone’s got an A average,” Steenson said. “When you look at the breakdown of their SAT [or] ACT scores, [and] you look more deeply [at the] basic algebra and geometry, they don’t have those skills.”
Over the past five years, the College has consistently received around 28,000 applications, upward from application numbers around the low 20 thousands prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Coffin. He attributed this “surge” to a test-optional policy adopted during the pandemic for the Class of 2025 through the Class of 2028.
The 2024-25 application cycle, which saw the highest number of applications in the College’s history, was an “outlier” in application trends, according to Coffin.
Coffin suggested that another reason for the decline in applications might be because of the Trump administration’s actions targeting the immigration status of international students across the country. He noted that the College has received fewer international applications since President Donald Trump’s election in 2024.
2024-25 “was the last cycle before Trump,” Coffin said. “Geopolitics is having a slight cooling effect on international applications.”
Sudiptha Paul ’27, who works as a self-employed college admissions consultant, agreed that Trump administration policies have contributed to the decline in application numbers.
“The Trump administration has attacked prestigious universities and hindered their reputation,”
Paul said. “The academic destruction that they’re doing has caused a loss of trust in schools.”
Paul added that his clients have expressed concerns about Dartmouth from “both sides of the political spectrum.”
“There’s a lot of parents who will ask me … ‘do you think this is a good school for my kid to go to because it’s so liberal?’” Paul said. “Or they’ll sometimes say ‘can my kid go here because of the way that the Trump administration is controlling them?’”
Still, Coffin said the consistency of application numbers to the College in past years reflects high school students’ “genuine preference” for Dartmouth, which he said differs from applications to other Ivy League universities.
“Some Ivies get volume because kids are saying, ‘I want to go to an Ivy,’” Coffin said. “More of our applicants are making a deliberate decision to apply to this campus in the woods of northern New Hampshire.”
Paul said that he also believes that Dartmouth’s “singular” location and culture have helped application numbers remain “steady” over the years.
“Kids who love Dartmouth will apply to Dartmouth,” Paul said. “Kids who don’t see a fit here in Hanover won’t apply.”
Tierney Flavin ’28 is a senior news reporter covering College politics. She is from Kansas City, Mo. and plans to major in Government and Sociology.
