Rutgers Welcomes 250th Anniversary Class of 2016

Academic achievement and diversity define university’s first-year students

Approximately 7,500 first-year students over all three major campuses will help make the student body at Rutgers the largest in the university’s 246-year history.

More than 58,000 degree seekers in Newark, New Brunswick and Camden comprise the record-setting population. Classes for the 2012-2013 academic year begin Tuesday, September 4.

With nearly 200 valedictorians and salutatorians among them, members of the Class of 2016 join one of the most academically competitive first-year and transfer students Rutgers has seen.

Credit: Nick Romanenko

Their average SAT scores – 1835 out of a possible 2400 for enrolling, regularly admitted students in New Brunswick, for example, up 10 points from last year – are approximately 300 points higher than New Jersey and national averages, says Paul Johnson, assistant vice president for enrollment management.

Rutgers expects more than 1,000 University Merit Award recipients to be among the incoming class members, and approximately 95 Presidential Scholars. The Presidential Scholarship is considered the most prestigious of the university awards.

Campus life will continue to have an international flavor. The first-year students are graduates of more than 1,000 high schools and come from 35 states and about 90 countries. Out-of-state and international students represent about 10 percent of the incoming class.

Of the foreign-born students, most hail from (in order) China, South Korea, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Canada, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Some 3,500 transfer students universitywide represent more than 500 colleges and universities. Also among the first-year students are 184 military veterans.

Business and biology lead the academic fields that attract most members of the class, followed by engineering, psychology, pre-medicine and dentistry, computer science, nursing, pharmacy, criminal justice and social work.

Below are other characteristics that help define the incoming class. Final statistics are expected to be available later in the fall.

• Approximately 20 percent of the students are of African-American or Latino background; more than 50 percent are nonwhite.
•  Almost 500 new students will take part in Rutgers’ Educational Opportunity Fund program, which offers financial and academic support for New Jersey students whose economic and educational circumstances have put them at an educational disadvantage.
•  About one-third of first-year students come from families in which neither parent has a four-year college degree.