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>> I'm extremely proud of leading the nation in graduation success rate.
I think it's a wonderful comment on our college; also a wonderful comment on the Ivy League
where all the schools are highly ranked.
And so when you look at your dream for a student athlete when they come in, well, obviously,
it's to graduate and to take your graduate rate and have it be the highest
in the country is something that we're absolutely proud of.
The first thing it says about Dartmouth is that we're bringing students here
who are representative of the student body, which, I think, obviously is one of our goals,
but it also speaks to the passion that the student show in the classroom as well.
So the average Division I graduation rate is right around 80 percent, so at 99.7,
I think the student athletes here have done a wonderful job.
When I think of our teams, I actually think of them as classrooms.
And so our objective with our athletic teams is to fulfill the mission of the college,
which is to educate our students and help produce leaders.
I think athletics is a particularly interesting way to do it, and I've often told people
that really, our teams -- it's like we have 34 laboratories.
And those are laboratories on leadership and laboratories on teaching.
The only difference is we make our mistakes in public, and sometimes you lose
in public, and it's a very visible entity.
So I think that actually changes the teaching dynamics somewhat.
But I think the mission of the institution, it's our job to fit under that umbrella.
Dartmouth Peak Performance is really programming that already existed in addition
to some new programming to influence the personal, academic,
and athletic potential of each one of our students.
We put this into place with a lot of support from the institution
and a wonderfully generous, anonymous gift.
And what it's really enabled us to do is more laser focus the programming that we bring
to student athletes to impact those three major areas of their lives.
I think one of the areas we're most excited about is the ability
to impact the leadership potential of our student athletes.
So we have a wonderfully generous gift that will allow us to enable every one
of our Dartmouth student athletes to go through a four-year leadership program
so that we can actually be intentional
about creating leadership and not leave it to accident.
You know, I meet with every captain, every one of our captains,
for somewhere between a half hour or more, and I'm constantly struck
by how thoughtful they are, how hard working they are, and how much they want to succeed,
and how much their athletic experience means to them.
It's really, really quite unique.