<p>I highly dispute the reputation with recruiters and grad schools. Dartmouth has 6 times as many grads entering harvard, yale, and columbia law and 4 times as many at Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton business. Dartmouth has 5/7 elite banks recruiting on campus, Vandy has 3 (vault.com). Dartmouth has 4/5 top consulting firms as a core school, Vandy has two. Dartmouth, in terms of grad placement and recruiting, is only after HYPSM (look at any survey out there...WSJ, whatever). Vandy is a great school, but saying its at the level of D is incorrect.</p>
<p>Vault.com is dated to about 2005, so your data is a bit old. Goldman Sachs now has Vanderbilt as a tier 1 recruiting school, and Deutch Bank, Lehman Bros. and plenty of other big firms draw heavily from there as well.</p>
<p>Plus, the reason many Vandy grads do not go to Harvard, Yale and Wharton for grad school is because most are not from that part of the country and choose to attend school closer to home. Vandy's kids are highly prized at Emory Law, Texas Law, Georgia Tech, Stanford, and plenty of other places.</p>
<p>Dartmouth without a doubt, I absolutely love to ski and I fell in love when I was visiting, but alas, as with the large majority of my schools, I was rejected. Do me proud, OP</p>