On Tuesday, September 9, Carleton College welcomes the Class of 2018 to campus. There are 526 students in the class, selected from a pool of 6,296 applicants. The students represent 47 states and 19 countries, with 70 students coming from Minnesota, followed by California (62), New York (38), Illinois (36), Washington (26), Massachusetts (25), Texas (19), and Wisconsin (18). Twenty-nine students hail from China.
Twenty-three and a half percent of the students identify themselves as people of color, 13 percent are among the first generation in their families to attend college, and 72.9 percent graduated in the top 10 percent of their class. Ten percent of the students come from countries outside of the United States.
Fifty-six members of the class are National Merit Scholars, two are National Achievement Semifinalist, and eight are National Hispanic Recognition Scholars. Members of this year’s entering class have participated in a wide variety of extracurricular activities: 84 percent have participated in community service activities, 67 percent were active in arts and drama activities, 62 percent participated in one or more academic clubs, 60 percent have played a varsity sport, and 57 percent play a musical instrument. Forty-three percent of the class had a paying job during high school.
The Class of 2018 includes students who speak American Sign Language, Burmese, Cantonese, Chinese, Creole, French, Ga, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Sudanese, Tamil, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.