One is a high school senior from northern Vermont who is eager to learn from Dartmouth’s engineering faculty how to use artificial intelligence to fight wildfires.
Another, who hails from a small Texas town on the Oklahoma border, says she doesn’t shy away from defending unpopular opinions and looks forward to engaging in “vibrant, nuanced conversations on systematic and social issues that affect law and politics” at Dartmouth.
Yet another, from Orange County, California, was inspired by an undergraduate who told him on a campus visit that “this might be one of your last chances to live away from the city,” and then fired his imagination with thoughts of hiking “The Fifty,” a test of resilience that traverses a 50-mile-stretch of the Appalachian Trail from the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge back to campus.
All three are among the 1,702 applicants who have been invited by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to join the Class of 2029 when it takes its place on campus in the fall. They were selected from a pool of 28,230 applicants, for an admission rate of 6%.
It marks the fifth consecutive year in which Dartmouth has received at least 28,000 undergraduate applications. The pool includes 3,550 who applied to the Class of 2029 as early decision candidates, which tied last year’s record high.
“Dartmouth has had a durable increase in application volume since 2020,” says Lee Coffin, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid. “Our pool continues to be wide and deep, with a 32% increase over the pool we evaluated five years ago. The applicants were as fantastic as always.”
Students who applied for admission in this year’s regular decision round received their decisions through the Admissions Office’s digital portal on the evening of Thursday, March 27. Ultimately, Dartmouth hopes those notifications will yield a first-year class of 1,185 students.
Applicants for the Class of 2029 were the first in five years who were required to submit SAT or ACT scores after Dartmouth was the first Ivy League school to reinstate the requirement following a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly 92% of admitted students have standardized test scores that rank among the top 25% percent of test-takers at their high schools.
“We evaluate all testing in the context of the school environment in which a student is enrolled and the community in which they live, and this new data point captures that important truth in a way that the previous focus—on the testing mean—cannot illuminate,” Coffin says.
Asked about the range of objectives of Dartmouth’s holistic admissions process—in which admissions officers consider applicants’ academic excellence and distinction, as well as a range of other qualities, attributes, and experiences evidenced inside the classroom and out—Coffin says that “Dartmouth is committed to broad socioeconomic representation” and that “the accepted class reflects that important goal.”
Those invited to join the Class of 2029 live in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as 57 other nations. Continuing a recent trend, 54% live in the southern or western regions of the United States or outside of the U.S.
“Dartmouth’s geographic axis continues to shift towards these important growth areas,” Coffin notes. California once again leads all U.S. states, with 1 in 10 of all acceptances; New York is a close second. The United Kingdom, Canada, and China comprise the three largest international cohorts in the accepted class.
When ranked, 96% of those accepted for the Class of 2029 are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class, and more than a quarter are projected to graduate as the valedictorian or salutatorian of their senior class.
In a further indication of Dartmouth’s ability to attract students from the broadest cross-section of society—an admissions priority—16% are in the first generation in their families to attend a college or university, 56% attend a public high school, and 15% live in a rural environment.
Last fall Dartmouth joined the Small Town and Rural Student (STARS) College Network, which helps students from small-town communities and rural America to get to, and then through, college. As an element of its membership in STARS, Dartmouth is prioritizing students from northern New England, with 82 offers to students from the region, including 34 New Hampshire residents.
Twenty-seven percent will qualify for free tuition, meaning their need-based scholarships are valued at or greater than $69,207, the cost of tuition for the 2025-26 academic year. Similarly, an estimated 22% of U.S. citizens and permanent residents will qualify for a Pell Grant, the federal aid program for students from the nation’s lowest-income households. That initial projection would be a record high for Dartmouth.
The Class of 2029 will be the second eligible for a middle-income initiative, funded by a bequest from the estate of Barbara and Glenn Britt ’71, Tuck ’72, that enabled Dartmouth to nearly double the income threshold for a “zero parent contribution,” from $65,000 to $125,000 for families with typical assets. That threshold—which replaces the annual parent contribution with an expanded scholarship of an equal amount—continues to be the highest of any college in the nation.
At the time decisions were released, 310 students qualified for this expanded scholarship.
More than $52.6 million in need-based scholarships have been offered to the accepted class, and the average aid award for members of the Class of 2029 is $70,607.
The Board of Trustees earlier this month set undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board for undergraduates at $91,935 for the upcoming year.
Kathryn Bezella, who was appointed dean of undergraduate admissions in October, says she was struck by the degree to which applicants had researched the signal offerings that differentiate Dartmouth and then explained through their application essays how they saw themselves as a fit.
Stitching together the applications of those offered admission, Bezella says they described a modern-day Dartmouth that she recognized: a research university where scholars teach, dialogue is encouraged, community is prized, environmental sustainability is valued, and a sense of place is cherished.
“So many students cited specific faculty members and identified classes they are drawn to by name,” she says. “It’s clear to me that these students are connecting in very personal ways to the ideas that are being explored at Dartmouth.”
“The class represents a cohort of individuals who will thrive and have an impact here,” she says. “One of my favorite parts of this process is the image of these individual students coming to campus and meeting one another, and the atoms beginning to ping off each other.”
