Amherst College accepted 180 out of 454 Early Decision applicants to the class of 2020 this past December, according to the Office of Admission.
The accepted applicants are expected to comprise about 38 percent of the target of 472 members for the class of 2020, a 2 percent increase from last year, according to Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Katie Fretwell. Overall, the college received 28 fewer Early Decision applicants than last year.
The college received a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation this past December to make teaching more inclusive and effective for students starting in the fall of 2016.
The mission of the Mellon Foundation is to promote the humanities, arts and social sciences through supporting institutions of higher education.
A newly reestablished group, the Asian Students Association, has seen a surge in membership in the weeks following November’s Frost sit-in. This fall a group of students has revitalized the organization, which they say aims to foster solidarity among Asian students of different national backgrounds.
Students voted to express their support for removing Lord Jeff as the college’s unofficial mascot in an Association of Amherst Students poll conducted on Tuesday, Nov. 17.
Eighty-three percent of students voted in favor of removing the Lord Jeff, and 17 percent against. The AAS released the poll’s results on Thursday, Nov. 19. In total, 1,606 students voted, which exceeded the AAS’s hopes for at least 1,200 responses and made for a 90 percent response rate.
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Students voted in a college-wide poll on Tuesday, Nov. 17 on whether to support removing the Lord Jeff as Amherst’s unofficial mascot. The Association of Amherst Students conducted the poll and will release its results on Thursday.
The poll comes in the wake of an informal straw poll conducted at a special meeting of the faculty on Nov. 16, in which all faculty members present voted in support of removing the Lord Jeff.
Hundreds of students gathered in Frost Library Thursday and Friday to protest racial injustice and demonstrate solidarity with student protesters at the University of Missouri and Yale.
The sit-in began Thursday at 1 p.m. and entered its 30th hour Friday evening, when student leaders announced they would continue the sit-in until further notice.
The Association of Amherst Students and the Office of Institutional Research distributed an online survey on loneliness to the student body on Nov. 3.
In the 2014 National College Health Assessment survey, 76 percent of Amherst College respondents reported feeling “very lonely.” But because only 30 percent of students took the survey, the results were not statistically valid. This year, AAS senator Evelyn Ting ’17 and Michael Bessey ’18E worked with the Office of Institutional Research to organize a more accurate survey.
