Hanover, New Hampshire is home to Dartmouth College, a prestigious private research institution that is a member of the Ivy League. It was founded in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock and is considered to be one of the nine colonial institutions that were authorised before to the American Revolution. Although it was established with the intention of instructing Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university spent most of its early history primarily training Congregationalist ministers. As time went on, however, the institution gradually secularised, and at the turn of the 20th century, it emerged from relative obscurity to assume a prominent position on the national stage.
Dartmouth University, which adheres to a liberal arts curriculum, offers undergraduate instruction in forty academic departments and interdisciplinary programmes. These departments and programmes include sixty majors in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. In addition, students at Dartmouth have the opportunity to design specialised concentrations or participate in dual degree programmes. There are four professional and graduate schools at Dartmouth, in addition to the undergraduate faculty of arts and sciences. In addition, there are connections between the institution and the Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. The Hood Museum of Art, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts are all located on the Dartmouth campus, which is also home to the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences. Dartmouth University, which has an enrolment of around 6,700 students, is the most diminutive of the universities that make up the Ivy League. The acceptance percentage for first-year students is just 6.24% for the class of 2026, while the rate for normal decision candidates is only 4.7%. This indicates that the admissions process is quite competitive.
The main campus of Dartmouth College spans an area of 269 acres (109 hectares) and is perched on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River in the Upper Valley region of rural New England. The institution operates on a quarter system, which consists of four academic terms that are each 10 weeks long and runs throughout the academic year. It is well known that Dartmouth places a significant emphasis on its undergraduate students, has a robust Greek life, and maintains a broad variety of long-standing campus traditions. The Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I is where its 34 varsity sports teams play against other colleges and universities in intercollegiate competition.
According to U.S. News & World Report, Dartmouth University is regarded as one of the best universities in the country for undergraduate education. According to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, Dartmouth University was the only majority-undergraduate, arts-and-sciences focused, doctoral university in the country in 2021. The university was also listed as having "some graduate coexistence" and "very high research activity."
There are many notable people who attended this university, such as 170 members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, 24 governors of the United States, 23 billionaires, 8 secretaries of the United States Cabinet, 3 Nobel Prize winners, 2 justices of the United States Supreme Court, and a vice president of the United States. Among the other famous graduates are 79 recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship, 26 winners of the Marshall Scholarship, and 14 Pulitzer Prize winners. Alumni of Dartmouth College include a large number of high-ranking U.S. diplomats, academic academics, literary and media luminaries, professional athletes, and Olympic medalists. Dartmouth also boasts a large number of founders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.