Nearly 1,800 freshmen and 31 transfer students will be welcomed at Stanford University Tuesday, Sept. 18.

The class was culled from a record-breaking applicant pool of 36,631 -- 2,427 of whom were offered admission.

The new students come from 49 states -- Rhode Island not included -- and 56 countries.

The largest group of incoming students -- 38.1 percent -- graduated from California high schools.

The next top five regions represented in the class are the South (15.1 percent); international students and U.S. students who completed high school abroad (9.7 percent); the Mid-Atlantic (9.2 percent); Far West -- Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii (8 percent); and the Midwest (7.8 percent). The other regions are Mountain States (6.3 percent); New England (3.7 percent); and the Great Plains (1.8 percent).

Just over 90 percent of the freshmen are U.S. citizens, and 2.1 percent have permanent resident status. International students with foreign visas comprise 7.4 percent of the incoming class.

The Class of 2016 is composed of 52.8 percent men and 47.2 percent women.

Just over 13 percent are the first in their families to attend a four-year college, and about the same percentage are intercollegiate athletes.

Whites make up 36.1 percent of the class, followed by students who identify as Asian-American (22.7 percent); African-American (8 percent); unknown -- those who declined to state their race or ethnicity (7.7 percent); international (7.5 percent); Mexican-American (7.4 percent); other Hispanic (6.5 percent) and Native-American and Hawaiian (4.1 percent).

Eighty-nine percent of incoming freshmen earned a 3.8 or higher grade-point average in high school and 94.2 percent ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes. Their median SAT scores are 730 for critical reasoning; 740 for math and 740 for writing.

As for their primary academic interests, 26.9 percent indicated natural sciences; followed by engineering (21.9 percent); pre-law or pre-medicine (17.4 percent); humanities (16.5 percent); social sciences (11.5 percent); undecided (4.1 percent) and earth sciences (1.6 percent).

Among the 31 transfer students, ranging in age from 18 to 28, five are military veterans and four are international students.

Nineteen transferred from public institutions -- including 18 from community colleges. Eight come from private institutions and eight are international students.

One is a former professional figure skater, and another was a full-time intelligence analyst with the U.S. military, twice deployed to Iraq. Another is an Afghan feminist.

The new students will be welcomed by Stanford President John Hennessy Tuesday afternoon in an opening convocation in the Quad.

— Palo Alto Weekly staff

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