Stanley Yu, who will be attending Columbia University in the fall, has been named the Class Valedictorian. Yu was born in Arcadia and attended Baldwin Stocker Elementary School and First Avenue Middle School before matriculating to Arcadia High. All through middle and high school, he has earned straight A’s in every class on his way to a 4.0 cumulative GPA.

In addition to being a prestigious National Merit Scholarship winner, he participated in numerous extracurriculars. Yu played water polo for three years, was on the swim team, Speech and Debate, U.S Constitution and Government team which qualified for the national championships the past three years, captain of the Physics team, founded the Arcadia High Coding Club, and has volunteered for the Foundation of Disabled Youths for the past three years.

COPYRIGHT 2011 Michael Stevens

Arcadia High will also be recognizing 64 Salutatorians, which requires a minimum GPA of 3.93, at its graduation.

Arcadia High School will have its Commencement Ceremony for the Class of 2017 on Thursday, June 8 at 6:30 p.m. at the Santa Anita Race Track.

Earlier this year, Arcadia High School was ranked among the top 2 percent of the best public high schools in the entire state. According to Niche’s 2017 Best Public High Schools in California rankings, Arcadia is number 30 out of more than 1,300 public high schools in The Golden State.

For the second straight year, the graduating class from Arcadia High School has at least one student accepted into every Ivy League University in the country. In addition to that rare feat, the Arcadia High Class of 2017 also has at least one student accepted into Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Three Apaches were accepted into Harvard University, four to Yale University, seven to Cornell

University, two to Columbia University, five to University of Pennsylvania, two to Princeton University, two to Brown University, three to Dartmouth College, two to Stanford University, three to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two to California Institute of Technology.

Arcadia High Class of 2017 By the Numbers:

Graduates: 883

Graduation rate: 99.2% (national average: 82%)

GPA: 3.29 (meets minimum requirement for all UC schools)

Average SAT (2400 is top score): 1924 (national average: 1497)

Average New SAT (1600 is top score): 1300 (national average: 1080)

Colleges applied to: 382

College most applied to: UC Irvine 368

Private college most applied to: USC 187

College most accepted: UC Riverside 229

Accepted to UCLA: 55

Accepted to USC: 48

Scholarships and Grant funding: $5.2 million