LEBANON — Dartmouth College is looking for a developer to build and manage a 300-unit apartment complex for graduate students on a 53-acre parcel that the college owns on Mount Support Road.

The college formally announced on Thursday that it is inviting calls for proposals for the $50 million project, almost four months after its real estate office confirmed that Dartmouth aimed to broaden housing options outside Hanover for its older students. The plan foresees Dartmouth contracting by the end of summer with a developer to lease the land from the college and pursue permits for, construct and run day-to-day operations of the complex.

“We have 2,000 graduate students and house about a third of those,” Josh Keniston, the college’s vice president for institutional projects, said on Thursday. “We constantly have inquiries that far outpace what we can provide.”

If the new project passes muster with Lebanon officials, it would abut a 75-acre property where a Massachusetts developer, Saxon Partners, proposes to erect a complex of 250 apartments aimed at employees of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Together, the two projects would add more than 500 apartments to a number of housing complexes built along Mount Support Road in recent years. City Planner David Brooks said on Thursday that nearby Timberwood Commons contains 252 apartments and Quarry Hill hosts 39.

The townhouses at Sachem Village along Route 10 in West Lebanon currently provide most of the college-owned housing for graduate students, while most others rely on the commercial housing market. Dartmouth graduate programs include the Tuck School of Business, Geisel School of Medicine, Thayer School of Engineering, and the newly created Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.

Priority for rentals of the Mount Support Road units on the college land would go to graduate students, with Dartmouth envisioning the developer then offering unrented units to faculty and staff, then to Dartmouth-Hitchcock employees and lastly to the general public.

Even if the Mount Support units fill up, Keniston said, “it frees up the existing housing they were living in before, which helps the Upper Valley more broadly.”

The college announcement also follows the recent unveiling of a plan by DHMC to further expand its main campus at the very end of the road. As with Saxon’s DHMC-focused apartments, with their projected output of 12,000 gallons of wastewater a day, the college project could run up against a partial building moratorium in that part of the city, related to stresses on the city’s aging disposal system.

While the city has an agreement with Hanover to send wastewater from DHMC and the Centerra business park to Hanover’s treatment plant, Hanover has indicated that it can’t take much more.

“We have very limited sewer capacity,” Lebanon City Councilor Karen Liot Hill said on Thursday morning. “The capacity that this project would need does not now exist.”

Liot Hill, an alumna of Dartmouth, added that she sees promise in the college’s idea of leasing the property to a private developer with experience building and running large complexes. The college also is planning to invest $200 million in biomass power and hot-water heating, with a private partner building and running the plant, whose location in Hanover has yet to be announced.

“What (the Dartmouth housing plan) potentially does is bring more people to the table to solve the capacity problems of the city,” Liot Hill said. “If they want the project to be approved, they’re going to have to be partners. We’ve been open to the idea of working with people who want to create more housing. … We started looking at where this was happening in other parts of the country with major institutions, including the Mayo Clinic (in Rochester, Minn.), where they have a robust public-private partnership that is helping solve infrastructure problems that the municipalities and the institutions couldn’t solve, on their own.

“This is part of a new wave. … It’s a promising strategy for the Upper Valley.”

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.