Dartblog

John Sloan Dickey used to say that Dartmouth would remain a college as long as the number of graduate degrees granted each year totaled no more than 20% of all the degrees bestowed by the College. JSD would not be happy today. As you can see below, of the 1,779 degrees given out at Commencement (not including honorary degrees accorded to an invisible presidential wife and others — with no degrees awarded for scholarship alone), almost 39% went to students from the College’s graduate programs. So much for the primacy of undergraduate education in Hanover.

However the most striking figure is just how small Dartmouth Medical School is in relation to the attention focused on it by the Trustees. Not only have they announced their intention to push DMS into the ranks of the top 20 medical schools in America, it seems that for several years now, the undergraduate program has subsidized the operations of the med school. All that for an institution that granted a grand total of 108 degrees this year, of which 39 were Masters degrees.

The beat goes on with the recent announcement of the construction of the North Campus Academic Center — to be built, along with the Williamson Translational Research Building, with the proceeds of the College’s recent $150 million bond offering. The NCAC might have the semantic camouflage of the world academic in it, but it seems that there will be little room for undergraduates in a building that will house the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, the Center for Health Care Delivery Science, and the Dana Biomedical Library.

Erratum: An attentive reader has written in with a correction to the above. In addition to the MD and Masters of Public Health degrees awarded by DMS, the school also grants a substantial number of PhD and Masters of Science degrees. The exact figures for 2011 and 2012 have not been published, but in 2010, DMS awarded the following degrees: MD: 86; PhD: 41; MS: 23; MPH: 42 — a total of 192 degrees.