On June 25, the Council on Student Organizations — which recognizes and funds over 400 student groups — announced in a list of guidelines changes for the 2026-2027 academic year that pre-professional groups must henceforth have “open, non-selective membership.”
Non-selective membership organizations “shall be open to all Dartmouth undergraduates,” while selective membership organizations are “limited to individuals satisfying specified skills-based membership criteria,” according to COSO’s official policies for participation in student organizations. Organizations may only have selective membership if it is approved by COSO when an organization is recognized and the application process and timeline is outlined in the group’s constitution. The standards used to select members “must support the mission of the organization” and be “skills- or talent-based.”
New student group applications are not considered until the fall term. COSO recognition enables groups to request funding for campus events, publications, conferences and travel. COSO declined to comment.
There are 62 organizations listed as pre-professional on the Dartmouth Groups webpage as of July 1. Some of them currently have screening processes for new members.
Dartmouth Consulting Group — a COSO-recognized pre-professional club that provides consulting services for businesses and “connects” members with professionals in the management consulting industry — has open membership, according to its constitution on Dartmouth Groups. The group hosts open-to-campus education sessions followed by a competitive “recruitment” process for “partner” status in the fall term, according to September 2025 campus-wide emails.
A spokesperson for DCG wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that it is “impossible to staff everyone who wants to join on a client project.” When asked, DCG’s executive board did not yet know how the membership guideline change would impact their organization, if at all.
The Society of Women Engineers has open membership and hosts events open to all of campus that aim to fill the “gap” in on-campus engineering advising and “empower women and gender-nonconforming individuals,” according to SWE president Fatmata Sesay ’27.
“We keep them [women and gender-non-conforming individuals] centered in how we curate our programming, but we by no means are ‘selective’ about attendance or participation,” she wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
The Dartmouth’s request for comment was the first time she learned of the guideline change, she wrote.
She added that she thinks the change could be detrimental to other pre-professional groups who offer “services” to outside businesses or people.
“Most of these groups are ‘selective’ because if they weren’t, there would be more students than there is work leading toward discontinuous communication and output with clients and leaving many students unsatisfied anyway,” she wrote.
The Medical Law and Ethics Society, a COSO-recognized pre-professional group on campus that educates members on the intersections between ethics, law and medicine, has discussion-based weekly meetings focused on “day-to-day issues that doctors might see,” according to MLES president Adora Perry ’28.
MLES membership and meetings are open to all undergraduates, which helps the club reach students who “actually want to be there,” Perry said.
MLSE’s executive board has competitive applications. Perry said she thinks that selective membership can benefit some pre-professional clubs, but not all clubs “need to be” competitive. “It’s worth it to have something that you had to try out for, so maybe when you’re talking to employers or other people, it just demonstrates a certain commitment … but at the same time, people who are executives in my club can also demonstrate that,” she explained.
Iris WeaverBell ’28 is a reporter and editor. She is from Portland, Ore., and is majoring in economics and minoring in public policy.
