Native Americans have had a long and often troubled history with the Ivy League. But how do they fare in the present day? The Ivy League has made great strides to ensure their campuses are welcoming and accessible to Native American students, but some have gone further than others. Each school’s accessibility to Native Americans can, to some extent, be gauged by the percentage of Native Americans enrolled in each undergraduate program. Let’s take a look at Native American enrollment across the Ivy League using data from each university’s most recent Common Data Set. While evaluating this chart, it is important to keep in mind that Native Americans make up 2.9% of the U.S. population according to Census data.

Native American Students in the Ivy League By the Numbers

Ivy League School	Native American Enrollment (%)
Brown University	0.26%
Columbia University	0.37%
Cornell University	0.22%
Dartmouth College	1.01%
Harvard University	0.32%
Princeton University	0.13%
University of Pennsylvania	0.11%
Yale University	0.41%

Breaking Down Native American Enrollment in the Ivy League

If the proportion of Native Americans in the U.S. population at large is any barometer for the number of Native Americans who should be present in the Ivy League, every school comes up short. Sure, around 15% of undergraduate student bodies at Ivy League schools are international students, but this proportion does not account for the underrepresentation of Native Americans. To put these numbers into perspective, roughly 37% of undergraduates in the Ivy League are white, which is about half the proportion of the 71% of U.S. citizens who identify as white. If this comparison serves as any indication of how many Native Americans should be found in the Ivy League, one would expect these schools to report that roughly 1.5% of their students identify as such.

The only school that even comes close to this expectation is Dartmouth College. The College on the Hill’s 1.01% of Native Americans in the student body dwarfs all other schools in the Ivy League. The University of Pennsylvania, the school with the lowest proportion of Native Americans, has nine times fewer than Dartmouth. Even Yale University, the school with the second-highest percentage, has less than half the proportion of Native Americans walking its campus relative to Dartmouth.

Why Dartmouth Leads the Charge of Native American Representation in the Ivy League

Dartmouth is far and away the most accessible and welcoming school in the Ivy League for Native American students. However, a controversial history accompanies this fact. Dartmouth traces its roots to the “Moor’s Indian Charity School,” a Connecticut-based Christian missionary training school for Native Americans that was founded by Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock would go on to found Dartmouth College in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire to be closer to Native tribal lands. Recruitment efforts of the Native population soon increased. However, as the institution gradually grew in prestige, the education of Native Americans stopped being as much of a priority.

Unfortunately, the school’s historical relationship with Native Americans was soon treated as a quirk of campus culture. Dartmouth’s official mascot was an offensive “Indian” until the 1970s as a result of this early history, and it would not be until the late twentieth century that Dartmouth sought to proudly reclaim this history. Today, the Ivy League school boasts a Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, four Native American student affinity groups, and the Native American Program. NAP’s mission reads as follows:

“The mission of the Native American Program is to support the well-being and success of Indigenous students at Dartmouth through programming and initiatives dedicated to four main pillars: Academic Support, Well-Being, Community Engagement, and Personal and Leadership Development.”

Dartmouth’s strong support for Native American students makes Ivy Coach proud to call itself “The Dartmouth Whisperer.” We call upon every other school in the Ivy League to take its queues from Dartmouth by investigating their history with America’s indigenous population, reaching out to Native communities across the nation in their recruitment efforts, and supporting those students who do enroll with robust programming, opportunities for research, and community initiatives.