Reed Is Hot Hot Hot: 2026 Freshman Class Admissions Data

Every year, a unique new group of freshmen arrive at Reed College full of hopes, dreams, and data to be dissected. This year, a Quest reporter spoke with Gil Villanueva, who has recently started his new role as Interim Vice President of Admission and Financial Aid, to get 2026’s incoming freshman data and a better understanding of this year’s class. All information for previous classes can be found at Institutional Research’s website, https://www.reed.edu/ir. 

First off, let us dispel the widespread misinformation that this year’s freshmen class is the largest ever to join Reed. In fact, it doesn’t even rank in the top five. Villanueva commented that Reed’s target number of students has been 375 (with 15 fall transfer students) for many years, and Admission was quite happy with the total (379) they achieved this year. 

Largest Freshman Classes

2021: 502

2015: 421

2017: 413

2019 & 2022: 394

2026: 379

The last half-decade has been incredibly volatile in terms of how people decided to attend college. Of course COVID was the mother of all upsets, but also the “great FAFSA debacle of 2024” left many schools unable to fulfill their goals. The Trump administration’s blows against higher-education have wreaked havoc as well, particularly in relation to international student admissions. Reed, though, has managed to maintain a fairly consistent freshman class size these last few years. 

The data from the last 30 years seems to indicate that Reed has become a more selective and sought-after institution. The number of inquiries into Reed has more than tripled in the last 10 years, and the number of applicants has followed a fairly similar trajectory. Consequently, Reed’s acceptance rate has decreased considerably since the ‘90s, although it seems to have been holding fairly stable around the upper 30% for the last 20 years. 

Admissions has the tricky job of accepting more people than they hope will attend, based on the knowledge that many of those accepted will end up choosing other schools. This magic number, the ‘yield’, or as Villanueva put it, Reed’s “ability to convert admit offers into matriculants,” is key to getting a healthy class size. 2026’s yield was up a percent or two from the last few years, but is still somewhat lower than it has been in the past. 

Now, this is all lovely data to look at, however what most people are more interested in is the demographic composition of the freshman class. Villanueva eloquently described how Admission is “trying to build an orchestra every year,” and so we naturally ask, what does that orchestra look like in 2026?

The Reed Office for Institutional Diversity (OID) offers a presentation to Freshmen to let them know more about their peers every year during O-Week. From this year’s Reed Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) survey, a form filled out across many universities, we learned the following interesting tidbits about the ~300 freshmen who responded:

You are worried about being ostracized for political perspectives. (Yes: 9.6%, No: 90.4%) 

Choosing to avoid the use of alcohol of drugs is important value for you. (Yes: 62.0%, No: 38.0%)

You have had to "come out" in order for people to know your sexual orientation and/or gender identity. (Yes: 57.9%, No: 42.1%)

Your assumptions or implicit biases have negatively affected your interactions with another person. (Yes: 48.9%, No: 51.1%)

Is there some aspect of your identity that is frequently misunderstood or oversimplified? (Yes: 70.1%, No: 29.9%)

During this presentation, OID has traditionally also shared demographical information such as gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, geographic diversity, etc. This year, such information was not shared with the freshman class, and when the Quest requested the information from OID, it was politely declined. OID said that this change was the result of consideration of “feedback from previous years and our thinking about how best to present the survey responsibly and usefully.” They have changed the program to place greater “emphasis on the importance of Intergroup Dialogue (IGD) [with] facilitated small-group dialogue with IGD-trained OWLs.”

OID has chosen not to share this data yet as, “In a relatively small cohort, combining or comparing identity categories can create confidentiality concerns, particularly for students who belong to very small groups. Protecting respondents’ privacy is a commitment we make to students when they take the survey.“ Hence, “We have not yet presented these survey results to the broader campus community. If and when we do, we want to do so in a format that provides appropriate context and protects respondent confidentiality… we'll be offering data events this year to share out the 2026 HEDS Sense of Community survey.” 

So, if you want to know more about your class, stay tuned. Finally, to round out our information, here are some random fun facts I learned from contact with Villanueva in Admission. The average unweighted GPA of incoming freshmen is 3.80. Additionally, the SAT average is 1402 (93rd-95th percentile). However, one should strongly take into account the fact that Reed is SAT-optional, and so only the people with the best scores are most likely to submit theirs. The most popular states of origin are California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, New York, and Colorado. The largest countries of origin outside the U.S. are China and Taiwan. International students make up 8.4% of the incoming class. Domestic students of color are 44.5% of the incoming class (a fairly similar number to last year).