A Whopping 15 Percent of All Accepted Students at Swarthmore College Are Black

Swarthmore College announced that it accepted 890 students for the Class of 2011 who will enter this fall. More than 5,200 students applied to Swarthmore this year.

Blacks make up a whopping 15 percent of all accepted students. In 2006 blacks were 13.9 percent of all students accepted at Swarthmore. Only one third of all black students accepted at the college decided to enroll. However, blacks still made up 11.6 percent of this year’s freshman class, the highest percentage among the nation’s 30 highest-ranked liberal arts colleges. It was also the highest percentage of black students in an entering class of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges since JBHE first started tracking these results in 1993.

With an even larger percentage of accepted students this year, Swarthmore looks like it will once again be the top performer in recruiting black students among the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges. It seems likely, too, that the black percentage of this year’s entering class at Swarthmore may set an all-time record for the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges in the JBHE survey.

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