I never got his name, but the fellow ’10 in the lane next to me was visibly nervous, shakily paddling in the water with the help of the assistant administering his swim test.
A swim of 50 yards is usually not a memorable event, unless the stakes are high—if you are racing for a medal, say, or if that swim stands between you and your expensive college diploma.
The memory of my classmate’s anxiety came back to me recently when a news story in The Economist about the rather niche subject of college swim tests caught my eye. This year’s Dartmouth graduates, as the story put it, will be a class “fluent in literature, science, writing, and foreign languages—but for the first time in more than a century, not necessarily able to swim.”
The College has phased out the requirement that graduates swim a lap to earn their diplomas, ending an unusual tradition that had its early 20th-century roots in preparing young men for military service.
The test was a formality for most students, though certainly not for everyone. Almost every year, a small number of students who could not pass had to take swimming lessons to graduate. Getting into a swim class at the College could prove a challenge, too. Temporary closure of the Karl Michael Pool in 2014 sent those who still needed to fulfill the requirement scrambling.
Most students take the test during their Dartmouth Outing Club first-year trips—an easy thing to get out of the way at a convenient time.
I was one of the few who didn’t go on a first-year trip and never bothered to trot over to the pool to fulfill the requirement.
I realized I’d neglected it about a week before graduation and had to book my swim test at the last minute. Friends teased me: Only people who couldn’t swim put it off that long!
As it happens, I swim just fine. However, although I swam the lap without trouble, it was clear other students who showed up that day had delayed their tests because they could not. I surmised from snippets exchanged between the coach and the classmate in the next lane, as he unsteadily progressed through a crash course, that he was an international student. I wonder whether he found the day rather more memorable than I and if others through the years have shared his dread as they looked across the depths of the pool.
The only other thing I remember from my swim test was the appalling earache that was still hanging around at Commencement.
These days, that dip in the pool strikes me as a small window into an insidious kind of inequality.
Other parents may be familiar with the particular—and expensive—rigmarole of teaching young children to swim: the struggle to convince a squirmy toddler to shimmy into swimwear; the packing of towels and goggles and snacks and extra changes of clothes that inevitably get wet when dropped into a puddle on the changing stall floor; the harried shuttling into the car to get to the pool, out of the pool for the showers, and then out of the swimsuit and into those already damp street clothes.
This year’s graduates will be a class, for the first time in more than a century, not necessarily able to swim.”
In America, the price of swim lessons can be out of reach for those who don’t have friends or family with their own pool. The United States has 10 million private pools but only about 300,000 public ones, according to 2023 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s probably why more than three-quarters of children from families earning less than $50,000 a year do not know how to swim or swim well, according to a 2017 USA Swimming Foundation survey.
In China, my parents learned to swim in an estuary of the Yangtze River, a far cry from the schlep that many American parents of means go through to train their aqua-tots. For me in China a generation later, the communists let just about anyone into the public pool. When we moved to the States, there was a pool in our apartment block. I have no memory of swimming being out of reach.
When the faculty voted in 2022 to dispense with the swim test, it cited inequity in wealth and access as the reason. The faculty noted that those who failed were “overwhelmingly students of color” and having to learn to swim to pass the test amounted to an extra graduation requirement for some students. When the class of ’26 arrived for its DOC trip later that year, the swim test was simply gone.
The decision was controversial—at the time, alums denounced it in this magazine as a terrible idea and warned that swimming is a life skill needed to ward against the many water-related risks around campus. When the College committee deciding whether to keep the requirement formed in 2018, students polled by The Dartmouth were divided, with those in favor of the test citing similar reasons and those against noting unfairness for those with less opportunity to have learned to swim.
In the grand scheme of things, eliminating the test was a small move to address the many problems of inequity found at any Ivy League campus. But at least future graduates won’t suffer from swimmer’s ear when collecting their diplomas.
Boer Deng is supervising editor for enterprise reporting at CNN in Washington, D.C.
