Is Vanderbilt or Dartmouth harder to get into?

Both are extreme reaches, but Dartmouth is typically viewed as a bit harder to get into overall. It is an Ivy with a very small undergraduate population, and its applicant pool is both very strong and heavily self-selecting. Vanderbilt is also exceptionally selective, but in most recent cycles Dartmouth tends to sit slightly above it in perceived selectivity.

For list-building purposes, I would treat them as being in the same top tier of difficulty rather than meaningfully different categories. A student who is competitive for one can absolutely be competitive for the other, but neither is a school where strong grades and scores make admission predictable. The difference is more like “very hard” versus “very hard, maybe a notch harder,” not “hard” versus “realistic.”

The student who is usually drawn to Dartmouth is often applying to a smaller, more intimate college environment with a strong residential culture, a rural setting, and a classic liberal arts feel inside a research university.

The student who is drawn to Vanderbilt is often looking for a high-powered university in Nashville with a more urban-social energy, strong pre-professional interest, and broader mainstream appeal across different kinds of applicants.

So if your question is simply which is harder to get into, the clearest answer is Dartmouth by a small margin. In practice, though, you should build your list as if both are equally high-reach schools.