318 Students Selected to Join Academy
318 kids from around the world, representing different and unique interests and skill sets, will all be new additions to the Exeter community this September. This year, the Academy experienced a 73 percent acceptance yield, a school record.
Last year, over-enrollment proved to be an issue for the Academy. "We were full everywhere. It took a lot of cooperation on the part of a lot of people," Dean of Residential Life AJ Cosgrove said. "The ninth grade class is substantially smaller than it was last year, or I should say last year was substantially bigger than usual."
Therefore, when it was time to offer admission to candidates, Admissions took precautionary measures to prevent over-enrollment for this year and years to come. "We made offers of admissions—437—to the fewest number of applicants in a very long time to control for over-enrollment, and I am happy with where we landed with our enrollment number," Director of Admissions Michael Gary said.
The students joining the Exeter community next year are split nearly perfectly by gender, an improvement from last year. "With the 318 new students, 162 are males and 156 are female, which interestingly is the same gender makeup of the current senior class," Gary said.
As usual, most of the new students will fall into either the prep or lower classes. In the school's successful effort to avoid over-enrollment, the prep class size has returned to the formerly designated number of 175. The number of accepted new seniors and post-graduates has been reduced to compensate for the large number of students accepted last year.
The class of 2018 and the new additions to classes of 2017, 2016 and 2015 bring remarkable diversity of backgrounds, interests and athletic and academic strengths.
Math instructor Joseph Wolfson, who read through incoming prep applications, noticed some impressive essays and resumes of extraordinary students displaying a wide variety of talents. "I read a couple of Caroline D. Bradley scholarship winners, and that's cool, including this one guy who has done work on artificial limbs,” Wolfson said. “Also, I read about a handful of cool siblings. There are always scads of fascinating preps each year, and this coming year should be no different."
Lower Rebecca Ju, one of the Academy's tour guides, agreed. "I toured quite a few sports recruits, including a fencer, equestrian and a gymnast," Ju said. “They all were qualified and intelligent and also so obviously dedicated to learning. They were genuine in their questions about the academic life here. I could see that they valued their education greatly, something that's fairly rare in a middle school student.”
During Experience Exeter week, current Exonians were able to meet, host, and hang out with some of the new students for a whole day of classes.
"I hosted a few kids that week, and one of them was Swedish but lived in Japan, which I thought was really cool because those are two really different cultures,” prep Ivy Hong said. “The girl was really excited to meet all of my friends and teachers and participated in a lot of the discussions in the classes she went to.”
Some Exonians even already made friends with incoming students, showing how special these new students will be to the community. "During Experience Exeter I met a really cool dancer, and I'm happy to find another person who shares my interest. I really hope we become good friends next year," prep Hannah MacKay said.
The new students are just as excited to become a part of the community. Incoming prep Will Soltas, brother of Evan Soltas ‘12 and Connor Soltas ‘13, expressed excitement about his decision to come to Exeter.
"When I came to Exeter for my tour and the revisit day, I felt at home," Soltas said. "All the students seemed like they were happy and loved it there. The faculty seemed motivated, friendly, and interesting. The class discussions were exciting, and the feeling I got was that everyone had something to do."
The Academy was able to uphold its reputation as one of the most generous boarding schools in the country in terms of its financial aid budget. 48 percent of new students will be receiving financial aid with an average grant of just over forty thousand dollars. Gary was very pleased with the generosity the school was able to afford. "We continue to be true to making our community accessible to youth from every quarter," he said.