Class of 2022, by the Numbers

Stats and insights into the new freshman class

September 18, 2018
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With two weeks of college under their belt, students in the Class of 2022 have already figured out their class schedule, where to go for meals, and how to use the Green Line and have started memorizing the University’s tangled web of acronyms.

By any measure, this year’s freshman class is impressive. They were selected from the largest applicant pool in BU history—a 6 percent increase from the previous year—and also the most competitive pool, says Kelly Walter (Wheelock’81), associate vice president and dean of admissions. Their average SAT score is 1421 (out of a possible 1600) and average ACT score is 31 (out of a possible 36).

Among their ranks is a UNICEF national council member, a biochem researcher who completed work for the International Space Station, and a cofounder of a Mexican urban gardening organization that educates her community about green living.

“By metrics alone, they are the brightest incoming freshmen in the history of the University,” Walter says.

An infographic displaying students average GPA, SAT, and ACT scores

Walter is especially excited about BU’s “yield,” a term used to describe the number of students who choose to enroll in an institution after being admitted. She says the school has seen a significant shift over the last five years. In 2013, 23 percent of admitted students chose to enroll: in 2018, that figure rose to 27.6 percent. “That gets at the attractiveness of BU,” she says. “Students are seeing and believing and saying yes to all of the qualities that make BU a world-class university.”

The Class of 2022 is one of the most racially diverse in recent memory—more than 17 percent are underrepresented minority students. At their Matriculation ceremony earlier this month, President Robert A. Brown urged the freshmen to both embrace and celebrate their differences. Citing Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), Brown said that inclusiveness is “woven in the fabric of the University.”

When asked, 32.8 percent identified as white, 17.6 percent as Asian American, 10.2 percent as Hispanic, and 6.3 percent as African American, among other groups.

This year’s class is diverse geographically as well, with students hailing from 48 states (Montana and South Dakota being the outliers) and 67 countries.

An infographic showing that 24% of the incoming class is international students hailing from 67 different countries. The top 5 countries are China, India, South Korea, Canada, and Taiwan.

Another mark of the Class of 2022’s diversity is socioeconomics—17.4 percent of class members come from low-income families.

Walter says students in the new class display an “inquisitiveness and engagement in an academic setting that will push our faculty.

“That’s exactly the type of engagement you want to see in a classroom setting,” she says. “Students will take advantage of both academic and nonacademic life at BU. They will thrive and make their mark at this institution and hopefully, make a difference in the world.”

Meaghan Glendon can be reached at mglendon@bu.edu.

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There are 6 comments on Class of 2022, by the Numbers

  2. colleges including bu put too much on metrics. I am sure there are some great students that didn’t get in because of metrics
    I hope bu considers some of these students

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  3. Congratulations to the class of 2022! I sincerely hope that BU administration works toward achieving equity for the 17.4% of class members from low-income families. The path to BU was undoubtedly challenging for these students, and their place at the university is not simply a means for administration to check a box on working toward diversity and inclusion. The success of these students is crucial to BU’s standing and social progress in general, and I hope the university supports these gifted young people to have as many opportunities to pursue valuable experiences at BU as their wealthy peers.

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  4. It’s interesting that they included a statistic about 17.4% of students being from low-income backgrounds. I am interested in how those students will be retained over four years at BU, and to what degree of debt they are taking on. As someone that would have fallen into this statistic in 2011, my experience at BU was markedly different from those that did not fall into that percentage point (the vast majority of the population).

    I am also interested to know how many of these students, and the general student population, come from Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and other cities/towns that border Boston. As a freshman at BU, I was shocked by how few students were actually from Boston. Years later, I have integrated into the community and work as a community-based advocate serving low-income communities in Boston and it would be an understatement to say that there is a lot of animosity between long-term residents of the City and the Universities. BU has a particularly bad reputation as compared with Northeastern & BC with regards to their dedication of resources to Boston’s low-income students.

    I think having such a high degree of international students is great and certainly enriched my experience in the classroom, but I also know that BU is dedicated to those students for a dual-purpose: full tuition payments and use of on-campus housing.

    Basically, the TL:DR is: I hope that those 17.4% of students have an equitable experience as compared to their wealthier counterparts, and I hope that BU tries to commit the same resources that they commit to recruiting international students to recruiting students from Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury.

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  5. As it relates to yield, these metrics are terrible when you deflate the ED applicants. Based on that, the BU, non-ED yield rate is south of 18%!!! Not impressive at all!

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  6. I am a BU College of Engineering graduate with a BS degree in Aeronautical Engineering (actually at the time the engineering school was called the College of Industrial Technology -CIT….the year following my graduation the name of the college was changed to the College of Engineering). I was admitted to Boston University having taken no SAT test and, in fact never having made an application to BU – literally until the day I filled one out in front of the college’s dean in his office. My high school record was not great and, aside from building “hot rods”, I had no extracurricular activities to boast about. Nevertheless I was admitted to BU on the strength of the endorsement by and at the request of my high school guidance counselor who, apparently believed that I could be successful. Well, after a spotty start at BU, finally recognizing and accepting that several hours or more of daily homework were essential to succeed, I graduated academically among the top 10% of the class, was the senior class president, one of the editors of the CIT newspaper, served as the president of the BU Chapter of the American Rocket Society (later the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and participated in numerous BU activities…Parent’s Day, etc…and I was selected as Man of the Year for CIT, the year of my graduation, by the Boston University News. After graduation I was elected as Chairman of the BU college of Engineering Alumnae Board of Directors and served in that position for several years, subsequently I was selected by the Engineering School’s dean to serve on the BU College of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and served for several years in that capacity. After a successful career as an analytical aeronautical engineer, I formed my own company, unrelated to engineering, focused on real estate development and, in fact, my firm partnered with Boston University in a proposal for a project in the City of Boston. Over time, my firm became a multi-million dollar enterprise. So I go through all that, not to boast but rather to inform the reader that I, for one, read with some sadness that BU relies, it seems, primarily on the normal standards that set high school graduates apart from one another academically and though it’s great to select high school students for admission who have illustrious high school careers and boastfully superior SAT’s, yet I wonder how many potentially successful people are passed over in the effort to improve BU’s entering class average SAT score? My success in my careers, both as an engineer and beyond are a direct function of my graduation from BU yet I could never have been admitted to BU today….and how my life would have changed.

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