The Class of 2003

Dartmouth College announced this week that only three black students had been accepted for early admission into the Class of 2003. This touched off the expected round of administrative hand-wringing; no matter how you spin it, “3 blacks” looks bad.

The Daily Dartmouth got itself worked up into a duly severe fit and charged around interviewing any campus luminary or semi-luminary it could get its hands on who was willing to say that November's “ghetto party,” and the national press attention it garnered, did profound damage to the College's reputation amongst minority students, and probably discouraged qualified blacks from applying. The Daily Dartmouth then published an editorial endorsing this interpretation — Dartmouth is seen as racist, so few minorities will apply.

This interpretation ignores several evident realities.

First, and most important, while `3' may seem like an absurdly small number, it is not significantly out of line with recent history. The Class of 2000, for example, also had only three black students admitted early. In the last five years, only once have ten or more black students received early admission to Dartmouth.

Second, very few students who are applying for financial aid tend to apply early, since they want to be able to compare packages offered by different schools, rather than be locked into whatever package is offered by the school they apply to early-decision. A disproportionate part of the black population is dependent upon financial aid, and so blacks are generally less likely to apply to any school early-decision.

Third, the new financial aid policies that have been adopted by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Dartmouth in the past year have upped the ante for the members of the Class of 2003. Since it appears that there is more money to be had from financial aid, there is more incentive for applicants to wait until regular decision to apply.

Again, since black students are disproportionately concerned with financial aid, it follows that this will be a bigger factor in limiting early applications from blacks than in limiting early applications from the general population.

Fourth, their was no associated decline in applications or acceptances among other minority groups. Dartmouth College accepted 19 Native American early applicants, up from 10 last year, and there were similar, if less drastic, increases in enrollment of Asians and Latinos. If Dartmouth really were perceived as a racist institution, it stands to reason that this perception would effect not only black applicants but all minority applicants.

The short answer, then, is that the number of accepted blacks, while on the low side, remains within the statistical norm, and the existence of fewer black applications this year can much better be explained by a series of factors than it can by charging a perception of institutional racism. Most likely, though, this is just a fluke.

During the wrenchingly severe administrative contrition ceremonies the Daily Dartmouth presided over in the days following the announcement, Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg expressed his extensive disappointment in the numbers and affirmed that the administration would try extra-hard to seek out talented black applicants in the future.

This is a poor and frantic response to a statistical quirk that cannot fairly be said to constitute a real problem.

I think Dartmouth's admissions office does a good job, generally. The people I've met here, almost universally, seem to be the sort of people I'd expect to meet at an Ivy League college.

Dartmouth seems, however, to be misunderstanding this year's statistical deviance as some sort of function of Dartmouth's reputation, and, if Karl Furstenberg's hints hold true, will be taking special care, when forming the rest of the Class of 2003, to watch out for black applicants.

The best way to ensure that Dartmouth College draw applications from talented black students, and from talented Asian students, and from talented Latino students, and from talented white students, is to keep the standards of admission high, to keep the incoming classes qualified, and so to maintain the intellectual and academic reputation of the institution.

It is not to make panicked grabs for applications that will boost the College's minority figures — that tactic is, in the long run, counter-productive.

-- Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Editor-in-Chief