Class of ‘23 Unqualified for Admission

At the end of last month, the Dartmouth admissions office reported that a record-low 7.9% of applicants qualified for admission into the Class of 2023. While it’s tempting to interpret a low acceptance rate as a sign of institutional prestige, Dartmouth’s admissions officers were quick to stress that this instance simply reflects a massively under-qualified applicant pool.

“More of an applicant puddle, really,” clarified Admissions representative Amanda Ploisterberg. “We had to abandon all our standards for academic and extracurricular achievement just to get the admissions rate up to 7.9%. If we had stuck to our usual SAT score requirements, we would have been left with around 30 admitted students, and I don’t even want to discuss the athletic situation. By the time we hit our target of around 1900 students, we were really scraping the bottom of the achievement barrel.”

According to Ploisterberg, applicants to the Class of 2023 were not only academically and athletically unfit for an Ivy League institution, but also displayed worrying social deficiencies. “Our alumni interviewers reported that almost one-third of the applicants showed up to their interviews wearing pocket protectors, which typically disqualifies an applicant on the spot.” Ploisterberg added: “My guess is about half of these losers are still virgins, and about a third have never engaged in underaged drinking. Some of them apparently played badminton in high school. This raises serious concerns about their fitness for an education at Dartmouth College.”

Despite these unprecedented shortcomings, Dartmouth College was forced to admit 1,876 applicants into the prospective class of 2023. The admitted-student reply deadline is May 1, and you just know the yield rate will be unusually high.

-BvH ’19