Reaching new audiences
The primary-year applicant pool numbered roughly 50,000, with an admit price of seven.5% for a category of simply over 2,100 — a category dimension that has grown by roughly 5% since earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic. The pool itself has grown by over 25% on this identical interval.
Lately, the variety of secondary colleges represented on this pool has climbed to greater than 10,000 — “a significant testomony to how we’re connecting with new audiences world wide, not simply rising software numbers the place we’re already well-known,” in accordance with Liz Kinsley, affiliate dean and director of undergraduate admission.
Certainly, this can be a file variety of first-gen trailblazers for Northwestern, because the College continues to develop the inhabitants of scholars whose mother and father didn’t graduate from a four-year school, up by over 60% previously decade.
Northwestern’s sturdy partnership with QuestBridge, a nationwide group that helps high-achieving college students from lower-income households, is one other signal of elevated variety, with a record-size cohort of Quest Students on their manner. The primary-year class additionally contains college students affiliated with a rising variety of access-focused companion organizations: Chicago Students, Faculty Horizons, HALI Entry Community, Morton Schapiro Northwestern Academy for Chicago Public Colleges, Posse, Seeds of Fortune, Thrive Students, and others.
Northwestern additionally has intensified commitments to making sure college students from rural and small-town America have the data and help wanted to enroll in and graduate from the school or college of their selection. Because of the College’s standing as a founding member of the STARS Faculty Community, this yr’s class brings noteworthy progress within the variety of college students from rural and small-town excessive colleges.
Benefiting from Northwestern’s interdisciplinary tradition
Incoming college students will research throughout six undergraduate colleges with greater than 75 potential majors, from classics to chemistry, Black research to biology, dance to information science, and the record of disciplines goes on. Many will pursue one in every of Northwestern’s dual-degree applications, combining areas like music concept and environmental engineering or theater and biomedical engineering. Round 6% indicated an “undecided” main, taking full benefit of the College’s interdisciplinary tradition and the quarter system’s breadth and adaptability to discover after which dig in.
Past the classroom, college students interact in a spread of extracurricular actions. They’re EMTs, affinity-group leaders, marching band drum majors, household restaurant managers, neighborhood activists, printed journalists, achieved scientists and Olympians. They’ve labored with the likes of Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Katie Couric, Mayo Clinic mentors and members of the U.S. Congress. Many already carry Northwestern’s revolutionary spirit, having began organizations, nonprofits or YouTube channels, reaching tens of hundreds of viewers.
Whereas college students from the Class of 2028 have solely simply arrived on campus, earlier within the yr additionally they loved Wildcat Days for admitted college students, regional admitted-student receptions, digital programming and “Purple Precedence conversations” to attach with College leaders, advisers, school, workers, alumni and present college students. As such, they’ve already begun to forge a powerful sense of neighborhood and Purple Pleasure.
Observe: Percentages reported on this story replicate class make-up as of Sept. 24, 2024. The numbers won’t be finalized for an additional 10 days. Northwestern’s reporting methodology tracks home college students who establish as a number of races/ethnicities in every class they choose, so the numbers will exceed 100%. For the Class of 2028, 22% of scholars indicated two or extra races/ethnicities of their software.
