Dartmouth & Cornell

YeloPen
Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:57:32 +0000

I think geography is very rarely a factor in college admissions and when it’s used, it’s mostly for accepting students from underrepresented states rather than limiting admits from larger states. There will be no severe disadvantage for you between applying to Cornell and Dartmouth ED. I personally don’t know why there’s the difference you mentioned (again, there are too many variables), but crazybandit’s explanation certainly sounds plausible.

Cornell and Dartmouth are both great schools, I don’t think you can go wrong at either one. There are some major differences, though. Cornell is a HUGE school; it’s around 20k students and that puts it closer to a public school setting than a private school. Dartmouth, on the other hand, has about 6k total students. Dartmouth’s small size makes it very undergraduate-oriented, and is probably the reason it’s teaching is ranked #1. Dartmouth is also known for having a huge Greek system influence, a lot of partying, etc. (not sure about Cornell in that respect). Cornell is very strong in engineering and the sciences; I got the impression that Dartmouth was more humanities-oriented but I could be completely off on that. Cornell is in Ithaca, NY and Dartmouth is in Hanover, NH; both are pretty isolated but surroundings-wise I think they’re very, very different.

I’m hardly the most knowledgeable about these schools, so I recommend you do a bit of research yourself. But I mean if you love Cornell that much, I would just do ED there and not worry about Dartmouth.