The National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced this week the Semifinalists for the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program, and 15 students from Jenks High School are among the 16,000 names on the list. Jenks has more National Merit Semifinalists than any other high school in the Tulsa area, and the third highest total in the state. JHS has qualified 10 or more National Merit Semifinalists in 14 of the last 16 years.
The Jenks High School students named National Merit Semifinalists for 2025 are: Zachary Bolden, Abigail Boughner, Esther Chen, Connor Garrett, Adam Humphrey, Hadley Kirk, Andrew Livingood, Eva Mahajan, Lauren Marnell, Ben McCullough, Garrison McKinney, Suraj Panchal, Harini Senthil, Emily Seo, and Gavin Yanik.
These academically talented seniors at Jenks High School now have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 6,870 National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $26 million to be offered next spring. To be considered for a Merit Scholarship® award, Semifinalists must fulfill several requirements to advance to the Finalist level of the competition. According to the National Merit Corporation website, approximately 95 percent of the Semifinalists are expected to attain Finalist standing, and about half of the Finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship, earning the Merit Scholar® title.
Approximately 1.3 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools entered the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2023 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of Semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.
National Merit Scholarship winners of 2025 will be announced between April and July. These scholarship recipients will join more than 382,000 other distinguished young people to earn the Merit Scholar title.
