Rural Students

Dartmouth College, an institution nestled in the woods of New Hampshire, is an ideal place for rural students to thrive.

Dartmouth has a longstanding commitment to educating the most promising students worldwide, regardless of their location, background or financial means. Rural students have long enriched the College's diverse undergraduate student body with their important lived experiences and perspectives.

What Does It Mean To Be "Rural"?

Dartmouth acknowledges that there are many ways to define what "rural" means. Here are a few examples below as a helpful starting point, but ultimately it is up to each student to define their own lived experience in telling their story.

• STARS and College Board use the National Center for Education Statistics' locales for "rural" and "town" to determine if a school qualifies as a rural or small-town high school. Try it for yourself by entering your school's information. In the "School Details" section, check the designation for "Locale."
  • Public school search
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• The Center on Rural Innovation, a Vermont-based national nonprofit focused on closing the rural opportunity gap, defines rural as:
  • Communities within nonmetro counties. Generally, these counties only have communities with fewer than 50,000 people and are not a suburb.
  • Communities in a metro county that are isolated from the larger city in that county. These communities score 4 or higher on the USDA's Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes.

Dartmouth Can Be Affordable For You

Dartmouth reviews applications without regard for your family's ability to pay for your education and meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all four years.

• Families with total income of $125,000 or less and who possess typical assets will have a $0 expected parent contribution.
• Dartmouth will not include required loans as part of the financial aid award created to meet a student's demonstrated need.
• Learn more about Financial Aid at Dartmouth.

Jake Tapper '91 on Financial Aid: Meet Raylen Bark '24

Telling Your Story As A Rural Applicant

"Let's talk about rural. For many students in the United States and around the world, that upbringing is the defining element of who they are. As they look towards college, it should be an indelible front-and-center part of the story the student tells by way of the narrative that informs the application."

— Lee Coffin, Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid

Exploring Admissions Through A Rural Lens

On the Admissions Beat, veteran dean of admissions Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College and a range of guests provide high school students and parents, as well as their counselors and other mentors, with "news you can use" at each step on the pathway to college. In the following episodes, he and his guests examine the ways students from rural backgrounds told their authentic stories through their college application process.

Meet Ramsey

Drawing on his hometown roots, Ramsey Ash '24 is writing his senior thesis on vaccine hesitancy in rural areas. He encourages other college-bound students from rural backgrounds to embrace that as a defining feature of their identity. "Colleges are interested in your story, and that includes the answer to 'What is the place you grew up like?' If you're a rural student and that's your story, tell it. Your experiences are interesting, different, and important." Read more about Ramsey's Dartmouth experience.