Eighty-eight percent of them spent their freshman year — fall 2020, the height of the pandemic — in hybrid or virtual learning. Six percent have smoked a cigarette. Five percent regularly use generative AI for school. And 63% agree that everything will eventually be explained by science.

That’s part of the picture of the class of 2028 that emerges from The Student’s inaugural first-year survey, inspired by The Bowdoin Orient.

The class of 2028 has made headlines for its demographic makeup, the precipitous decline in Black enrollment in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision restricting race-conscious admissions. But we wanted to learn a little more about the first-years beyond the general statistics the admissions office publishes each year.

276 first-years responded to our 35-question survey. That’s 57.5% of the class of 2028. Uneven response rates — for example, women were overrepresented with about 60% of responses — mean that the survey shouldn’t be seen as a perfect snapshot of the class, but there are still plenty of interesting results.

Background

The survey indicates that the typical member of the class of 2028 grew up in the suburban Northeast and has one — younger — sibling, but there is a good deal of diversity on all counts.

Two-thirds of respondents described the environment they grew up in as suburban, while 25% said they came from urban areas, and 9% said they came from rural areas. 44% said they were from the Northeast, with roughly equal portions of the remaining students coming from the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest, and West. Twelve percent were international students.

Around 60% of the class of 2028 attended public school, according to numbers published by the admissions office, but we chose to dig deeper into the high schools that students are coming from. Over 50% of first-years attended non-magnet, non-charter public schools, while 7% attended magnet schools and 4% attended charters.

As for private schools, around 7% of the class attended a high school with a religious affiliation, 13% attended boarding schools, and 17% attended non-boarding and non-religious private schools. Independent and boarding high schools are widely overrepresented in the class of 2028. During the 2021-2022 school year, just 10% of American pre-K to 12th-grade students attended private schools, and 77% of those students attended schools with religious affiliations.

Just 12% of respondents began their freshman year of high school fully in person, with a majority (53%) in hybrid learning and 35% fully online. An impressive percentage of respondents (16.5%) said they were the valedictorian of their high school.

Seventeen percent of those who responded said they were only children, 47% had one sibling, 22% had two, 7% had three, and 6.5% had four or more. Thirty-seven percent said they were the oldest child, 31% were the youngest, and 15% fell in the middle.

College preparation

To get a better sense of students’ pathways to Amherst, we asked a set of questions about their approaches to college applications.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they had worked with a private ACT or SAT tutor or a private admissions counselor, and 72% reported taking the ACT or SAT multiple times. Nine percent said they had taken the tests four or more times. Just 4% never took them, though Amherst continues to not require standardized test scores.

There were large differences in students’ connections to Amherst. About 47% said that none or just a few of the people at their high school had heard of Amherst, while 24% said that most of their peers had heard of it. We broke down the results by the region that students came from and found that Amherst was most well known in the Northeast.

Personal connections may have played a role in bringing the class of 2028 to Amherst: 49% of students said that they already knew a current (non-class-of-2028) student before arriving on campus, and 8% said a family member had attended Amherst, three years after the college did away with preferences for legacy applicants.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said that they pronounce Amherst with a silent H, while 16% favored “Am-herst” — and a few said they vary it based on who they are talking to.

Over 80% of respondents said that Amherst was either their top choice or one of their top choices, and of students who received financial aid, 64% said Amherst had been more generous than the other schools they considered. Around 40% of respondents said the financial aid question was not applicable to them. Thirteen percent of respondents are planning to take out loans to afford Amherst.

Habits, beliefs, and thoughts about the future

To get to know the class of 2028 better, we also asked a series of more personal questions. We borrowed a few of them from the Marriage Pact.

When it came to drugs, 31% of respondents said they had drunk alcohol, 14% said they had consumed marijuana, seven percent had vaped, 6% had smoked a cigarette, 7% had used a fake ID, and 1% had used cocaine or other “hard drugs.”

Fifty-seven percent said that they planned to go to parties, with a large contingent, 31 percent, saying that they were unsure if they would. Twelve percent said they weren’t planning to go out. This question is where we saw some of the strongest indications of the oft-discussed student-athlete divide. Ninety-six percent of athletes said they planned to go to parties, compared to just 49% among non-athletes.

We also asked students if they had ever cheated on an assignment — around one-third of respondents said they had. And despite much discussion of the potentially transformative impact of generative AI on education, only 5% of those who responded said they often used ChatGPT or similar programs to complete school work.

Unsurprisingly, the class of 2028 appears to be overwhelmingly liberal. 68% of respondents said they were somewhat or very liberal. And this fall’s presidential election would be no contest at Amherst: 87% of respondents said they would vote for Kamala Harris, while 6% would support Donald Trump. The long-shot third-party candidate Cornel West also received a handful of write-in votes. On this issue, too, we saw some evidence of a student-athlete divide, with more (but still a small proportion of) athletes favoring Trump.

We also asked about students’ news consumption habits. Around a third of those who responded said they consumed news daily, and a similar share said they did so “every few days” and “only when major events arise.” The New York Times was the preferred news source for many respondents, though a large number said they mostly got their news from social media.

Part of the survey asked respondents to slow down and ponder a few of the Marriage Pact’s more contemplative questions. The questions and results are reported below. One that asked whether respondents agreed that “it’s important that I make more money than my peers” produced some of the most evenly-divided responses of the entire survey.

Finally, we asked first-years how they were feeling about starting college. Their biggest worries were fairly evenly divided between social and academic concerns, but overall, three-quarters of respondents said they felt prepared for Amherst.

One thing almost everybody agreed on? They were excited to get started.

See the list of questions here. And view the data here.

Julius Tyson '25

Get to Know the Class of 2028: Results from The Student’s First-year Survey