Stanford University’s latest freshman class, which gathered on campus for the first time Tuesday, represents 49 states — no one from Arkansas this year — and 66 countries.
Stanford President John Hennessy welcomed new students and their families in the university’s 123rd opening convocation ceremony.
“We ask that you become an enthusiastic member of this academic community,” Hennessy said.
“We ask you to take advantage of what Stanford will offer – to have the determination and conviction to make these next years with us a springboard to a life lived with passion and commitment.”
The 1,679 members of the class of 2017 were culled from 38,828 initial applicants.
Geographically speaking, the largest group — 35.6 percent — is from California. Nearly 15 percent of the freshmen are among the first generation in their families to attend a four-year college.
Whites make up 31.7 percent of incoming freshmen followed by students who identify as Asian-American (21 percent), Hispanic (14.8 percent), African-American (10 percent) international (9.8 percent) and Native American or Hawaiian (4.8 percent). About 8 percent of class members declined to state their race or ethnicity.
Eighty-nine percent of the incoming freshmen earned high-school grade point averages of 3.8 or higher, and 95.9 percent ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes.
Natural sciences ranked as the top “primary interest” initially indicated among entering freshmen (28 percent), followed by engineering (24.8 percent), humanities (15.3 percent), pre-law or pre-medicine (13.9 percent), social sciences (10.4 percent), undecided (4.9 percent) and earth sciences (2.7 percent).
Also arriving this week are 28 transfer students ranging in age from 18 to 35. Twenty of those come from public institutions, including 15 from community colleges.
Six transfer students are U.S. military veterans and 13 come from outside California.
Stanford’s class of 2017 is composed of 53.8 percent men and 46.2 percent women.
Freshmen members of the class are the first who will be required to take Stanford’s new Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing curriculum, which includes courses in aesthetic and interpretive inquiry, applied quantitative reasoning, creative expression, engaging diversity, ethical reasoning, formal reasoning, scientific method and analysis and social inquiry.
Stanford adopted the updated graduation requirements in 2012 after a two-year study of undergraduate education.
“The WAYS are designed to help students integrate breadth requirements with their major requirements more effectively,” said Harry J. Elam Jr., vice provost for undergraduate education. “We hope that the WAYS can encourage students to think and approach their breadth requirements differently, not so much as something they just want to get out of the way, but as something that informs their whole Stanford education.”
Some 90 members of the freshman class also will inaugurate two residentially based learning communities – one focused on the arts and another on science. The students, who will live together in Burbank House, will be part of a tight-knit community that lives together and attends classes in the dorm, where they will share a lounge, dining hall, seminar rooms, improv space and music room.
Janice Ross, faculty director of Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) described the programs as “an art and science experiment in the richest sense of those explorations.”
“The ITALIC program has been built around a series of big questions about the historical, critical and practical purposes of art and its unique capacities for intellectual creativity, communication and expression,” said Ross, a professor of theater and performance studies.
“Alongside a stellar group of 44 students selected from a pool of applicants, we will investigate the challenges that works of art have presented to categories of knowledge – history, politics, culture, science, medicine and law – by altering one’s perspective on the world and expanding the horizon of the possible.”
Paula Findlen, faculty director of Science in the Making: Integrated Learning Environment (SiMILE), said the program’s teaching team hopes to engage students in a yearlong conversation about thinking and doing, taking the historical evolution of science, technology and medicine as three important and interrelated case studies.
“We don’t want the SiMILE students to consider these issues in isolation but in the context of living and talking with the ITALIC students, which naturally raises the question: How are the arts and sciences entangled forms of human creativity and, equally, expressions of the desire to make something intelligible from the world around us,” said Findlen, a professor of Italian history.
By Palo Alto Weekly staff
By Palo Alto Weekly staff
By Palo Alto Weekly staff
“Passion and commitment” are wonderful qualities, however I’d like to suggest that they include and encourage “integrity and compassion.”
Stanford has been exhibiting a lack of both qualities in recent years, always willing to abandon both for the big bucks.
I’ve always felt a personal pride in our community campus, but that feeling has been eroded in the extreme in recent years.
What they teach is our future and I’m thinking they are leading students down the wrong (completely mercenary) path.
If the content of these programs is half as clever as the acronyms (ITALIC, SIMILE), the freshman class should be in for a wild ride. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?”
Make that METAPHOR.
Here’s another recently coined acronym Stanford is working on…
BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies)
“Obama’s $100 million brain research initiative taps several Stanford scientists” — http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/april/brain-0402.html
There’s no such ethnic group as “Native American” let alone “Native American or Hawaiian”. At least there aren’t any for which Stanford would be able to cite statistics. The ethnic categories used by the federal government for reporting ethnic statistics are “American Indian and Alaska Native” and “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander”. Why does Stanford continue to cite stats for these fake categories? More important why does the press continue to repeat them. A quick check of the Common Data Set provided by Stanford to the US Department of Education will show that the figures in this article for those ethnic groups are greatly inflated.