On Incentives at Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a wonderful school with dedicated students, hard-working professors, and a beautiful environment. Standing apart from the other Ivies, it is unique in its location, culture, and history. Yet, the past several years have seen the school suffer from crumbling housing, ever-worsening food, and a mental health crisis that has resulted in a series of tragic student deaths. How can a school with so much potential suffer from such crippling failings?

Dartmouth’s housing has continued to degrade this year. From mold in several dorms, a series of broken pipes, and malfunctioning washing machines, to new suspicions of peeling lead paint in many of the older buildings, Dartmouth’s housing infrastructure appears to be coming apart at the seams. Yet, these are only symptoms of a problem that has been building for years. Since the school introduced co-education without either building enough new dorms or reducing male enrollment, Dartmouth has relied more and more on crumbling old buildings to house its overflowing student population. The Choates, the Hoovervilles of Dartmouth, are emblematic of this. Built In the 1970s to be riot-proof during an era of student protests, the Choates are famous for their small rooms, low ceilings, narrow hallways, and oppressive heat in the summer. Yet, the Choates are not the end of it. The River Dorms are some of the farthest housing from campus, and the school decided to put freshmen — who aren’t allowed to own cars — in them. The Administration has an appreciation for irony, if nothing else. Many rooms across campus have been converted from singles to doubles, doubles to triples, and triples to quads as the school continues to increase enrollment. Off-campus apartments, which should act as a pressure release for the school’s overpopulation, are expensive, generally cramped, and often decaying to the point of being unsafe. They exist as slums on the periphery of Dartmouth, housing huddled masses whom the housing system will not support. 

Recently, the student government championed a referendum to change Hanover zoning laws to allow for more occupants in a single apartment. This move, combined with Administration promises for more on-campus housing, was supposed to alleviate the problem of overcrowding. However, the on-campus buildings will not be built until 2027 at the earliest, and will likely take far longer given the school’s track record of construction projects going into overtime (see Dartmouth Hall). I would not put much faith into the off-campus apartments improving much either, as the resentful bumpkins of Hanover will do everything within their power, and admittedly mediocre comprehension, to frustrate efforts by Dartmouth students to move past the cordon sanitaire of West Wheelock St. and into their shining city below the hill. 

The problem of food only compounds the one of housing. As a ‘25, I have long heard tales from the ‘22s and ‘23s of the halcyon days of old. Back in their day, Dartmouth had something called “Late Night,” where after an on-night students could eat in Collis, Foco, or the Hop rather than wait on the side of the road for the Domino’s delivery driver to throw a cardboard box at them while he races around campus, single-handedly feeding the entire school. While Domino’s is arguably the worst thing to be called “food” since starving Russians ate boiled shoe leather during the Siege of Leningrad, it is admittedly superior to the options Dartmouth provides, which consist of an array of different flavors of the void. During the day, it is little better, between rising prices at the Hop, decreasing quality at Foco, and inconsistent Novack operating hours that would confound even Kronos himself. Faced with ridiculous prices even before the recent bout of totally transitory inflation, Dartmouth students began stealing the occasional pre-packed item from dining centers. After all, if we pay $80,000 per year for tuition, how in God’s name can the powers that be justify charging six dollars for a box of cheese and crackers? And what did Dartmouth Dining Services, that most venerable of school-sponsored corporate monopolies, do in response to this rise in civil disobedience? Well, they put up signs reminding us all that stealing is, in fact, a crime. Truly, Marie Antoinette herself could not have thought of a more tone-deaf way to address the starving masses. 

Students often look at these problems and, after getting over an initial bout of justified rage, start to wonder, why? Why does a school with a nine-billion-dollar endowment have decrepit dorms and food that is either terrible, overpriced, or terrible and overpriced? The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes irrational benevolence. It is here that us econ majors come in handy. One simply has to look at the incentives of those in power. Dartmouth is a nine-billion-dollar hedge fund with a school as its front. The byzantine bureaucrats in charge do not need to compete for students in any real sense, as they can play off of a reputation built up over two hundred and fifty years. The school thus has no financial stake in improving student amenities. Rather, its interest is to do the absolute minimum necessary to keep the lights on, costs down, and the rich parents just satisfied enough that they won’t sue. Once students arrive, Dartmouth has nearly total power over them. The school has its own disciplinary process and can remove students from campus at will, as demonstrated during the COVID pandemic. Further, as most of us are only here for four years, students will simply wait it out. The only solution, then, is for students to stop settling for mediocre exploitation. We cannot expect the Administration to do things out of the goodness of its heart. We must instead demand a balance of power between students and administrators so that the students can ensure that their interests are represented rather than ignored. We can accomplish this by securing authority for institutions like Student Government and refusing to respect the erroneous authority of the innumerable administrative departments. Dartmouth is a wonderful community, and it is vital for its health and future that we not let it be controlled by a star chamber of self-interested functionaries.