As I understand it, Dartmouth has both a need-blind and no-loan policy for students whose families make under $75k/yr which they only calculate after the decision to accept. At least this means that that decision wasn’t influenced by how much the school would have to shell out to cover the student. So, yes, lower income students still have many more obstacles than wealthy ones to achieving Dartmouth’s required level of academic qualifications for acceptance. But, the way it’s being done in this case (need-blind and no-loan) is not discriminatory against the lower income applicants and removes the cost barrier of attendance for those students after admission allowing them to actually go.

The so called elite schools in the US had record low admission rates in 2008 largely due to surging application levels. Dartmouth had the highest level of acceptance among them, at 13%, a full four points higher than any other Ivy league school. With this kind of competition, I think it’s a good sign that they and others are moving in this direction.

Larger scale, dramatic action is absolutely necessary but this is significant and valuable. Recognize them and then demand more.

Pretending that inequities don’t exist – under a “need-blind” system, does nothing to rectify the huge advantages that some populations hold, and it doesn’t serve disadvantaged populations – it just stops screwing them so badly. Ultimately, though they ignorantly and proudly claim otherwise in their self-supporting press releases, by not taking structural inequalities into consideration, schools like Dartmouth are not accepting the very best pool of students possible…but instead a disproportionately privileged group.