Class of 2009 Arrives
"I am confident that the College will find these creative, bright, and community-minded students delightful to meet and to teach," says Dean of Admissions Jennifer Delahunty Britz. "As a class, they're linked by their passion for writing and by their desire to become better writers, although their intended fields of study are diverse."
Members of the newest class include Anna Frutiger, a certified highland dance instructor from Michigan; David Azzolini, also of Michigan, who rode his bicycle across Iowa four times; Christina Kucher, from Pennsylvania, an Earthwatch Institute participant who spent two weeks at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Thomas Lewis, an artist from Tennessee who has created a portrait of Ray Charles entirely out of Post-it notes. Emma Mueller, who hails from Connecticut, has no fewer than seven relatives who attended Kenyon, including both her parents, two aunts, two uncles, and a grandfather. Ohio student Jacob Yandura has composed an original requiem for the victims of 9/11. Emma Perry of New Hampshire and Molly Papows of Massachusetts, classmates together at the Pingree School in Massachusetts, started the Steinert Review there, a Kenyon Review-like literary magazine.
From these students and others, the College received a record 3,929 applications for admission to the Class of 2009, leading to a record low admittance rate of 36 percent. The yield, or percentage of admitted students who enrolled at Kenyon, was 32 percent.
Indicators of academic quality among incoming Kenyon students continue to trend up. Twenty-nine percent of the class members had high school grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher. Fifty-nine percent graduated in the top tenth of their class, with more than a quarter ranking in the top 1 percent. The middle 50 percent of combined SAT scores ranged from 1240 to 1420 (630-720 verbal and 610-700 math).