The Gift of Education
As each generation supports the next, alumni generosity builds Dartmouth's future.
Each year dartmouth admits a class of bright, energetic, exciting and engaged students. We hire new faculty who are among the best teacher-scholars available anywhere. Our faculty compete successfully for academic awards and engage in scholarship on a wide range of subjects. We graduate women and men who go on to make many positive contributions to the world around them. And each year, those same graduates express their loyalty and support for Dartmouth in many ways. Few schools are fortunate enough to maintain the strong ongoing relationships with alumni that are such an important component of the Dartmouth community. From these strong relationships flow a multitude of benefits for our students and faculty.
to our undergraduate and graduate students. Dartmouth consistently fights above its weight class in most things that we do. Muhammad Ali once said, "Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision." The Dartmouth community has just such a vision. I recently shared with the campus a draft of the strategic plan that we have worked on as a community for the past two years. In that plan we lay out our key priorities for the coming decade. These priorities include accessibility to the Dartmouth experience through continued need-blind financial aid and the recruitment of talented students; hiring and supporting outstanding teacher-scholars; ensuring a climate that is welcoming to people of all backgrounds; strengthening the outof-classroom experience; and enhancing facilities to enable students and faculty to do their best work together. By meeting these priorities we can all help to ensure that Dartmouth College remains among the very best schools in the world by providing an outstanding education
To reach our aspirations, we will need to draw on all of our resources, including the support of our alumni. We have a strong history of alumni support. When Dartmouth Hall burned down in February 1904, our alumni immediately began to ask each other for contributions for its rebuilding. Before the flames had even been extinguished, Boston alumni called a meeting to raise the funds necessary to rebuild the campus landmark. By October of that year, our alumni had raised enough money to replace Dartmouth Hall. Two years later they gave the College a sufficient amount for the subsequent construction of Webster Hall. Out of these experiences came the idea, from Henry Hilton of the class of 1890, to have an annual appeal to alumni. Designated the Tucker Alumni Fund in 1906, contributions were to be used to provide scholarships for needy students. Now known as the Dartmouth College Fund, it has remained a vital resource for the College ever since.
Today Dartmouth has a participation rate in the Dartmouth College Fund of close to 50 percent. While this figure, among the highest in the country, is a good indication of strong alumni support, we believe it still does not accurately reflect the tremendous loyalty our alumni have for Dartmouth. Among our Ivy League peers, we jockey with Harvard for second place in the participation race behind Princeton. I aim for an even stronger statement of support from our graduates.
Rates of participation in the annual funds for Dartmouth's professional schools also demonstrate strong support. The Tuck School participation rate is greater than 60 percent, the highest of any business school in the country. At Thayer School of Engineering, 50 percent of the graduates give either to Thayer or to the College Fund, a level of participation that far exceeds that of most engineering schools. And the participation rate at the Medical School rivals that of our peer institutions, with 35 percent of DMS alumni giving to the Fund for Dartmouth Medical School and many others making gifts to the College.
Annual support of Dartmouth is one way in which our graduates ensure that current and future generations of students have the same opportunities to excel at Dartmouth as they had. Annual giving provides 11 percent of the budget for the undergraduate College and allows Dartmouth to continue with a number of critical programs, particularly our generous financial-aid policies. In the current first-year class, 43 percent of students receive some form of scholarship assistance from Dartmouth. Without that aid, its unlikely they would be here. Without alumni support, the College would not be able to offer them the assistance they require.
A few years ago I received a letter from a student who was funded through the Dartmouth College Fund Scholar program. She wrote of the "sheer joy which I felt when I realized that I would be able to afford to. come here....The fact that, despite my family's economic struggles, I can still have access to an education as enriching and fulfilling as that which Dartmouth provides never ceases to leave me awestruck at the power of this institution."
This gratitude is extended to all of our alumni who consistently and generously support the good work that goes on here.
