Dartblog

Trustee Candidate Mort Kondracke has an interesting nugget on his website:

… when a student is accepted at both Dartmouth and any other Ivy League school, we lose the overwhelming number to every one but Cornell.

If true, this is very disturbing information, but I wonder where Mort obtained it? In order to get verification, I went to the source — in the usual Dartblog manner — in this case, to the estimable Dan Parish ‘89 of the Admissions Office. Herewith his reponse:

Joe,

Thank you for your message and for your question.

I don’t believe that there is any publicly available information on the numbers of students who choose Dartmouth as compared to another college when admitted to both.

I assume that these numbers are not public in part because the data that Dartmouth and other institutions collect on these trends are based on self-reported student information (there is no way to share individual admissions results, student-by-student, among institutions).

Thanks again - sorry not to have more information,

Dan

Dan Parish
Director of Admissions Recruitment and Communication
Dartmouth College

The chart to the right accompanied a NYT story by David Leonhardt from 2006. It summarizes a survey of 3,200 high school seniors at 500 schools across the country. While the College does poorly against HYP (93%, 88% and 81% respectively of graduating high school students would choose those schools over the College), we lose only marginally to Brown and Columbia, and we take more students than we lose among seniors contemplating four years in Ithaca or downtown Philly.

These are not great results, but neither do they indicate an “overwhelming” preference for our sister Ivies (except Cornell).

The great thing about the Internet is that a writer can link to sources. I’ll follow up with Mort and ask him where he obtained his info.

Addendum: It looks like Mort will not be revealing his sources on this one, according to his official campaign manager, Stephanie Lewin:

Mr. Asch,

I am not choosing to communicate with you any longer as you violated a personal trust by publishing my personal email to the larger community.

Stephanie Lewin

What a shame. I really am interested to see if Mort’s assertion is true.