The National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced this week the Semifinalists for the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program, and 11 students from Jenks High School are among the 16,000 names on the list. JHS has qualified 10 or more National Merit Semifinalists in 15 of the last 17 years.
The Jenks High School students named National Merit Semifinalists for 2026 are: Tej Beniwal, Krishna Bhadriraju, Jeffrey Emmons, Kaytlin Flaherty, Aiden Hoskin, William Huckell, Sanjiv Krishna, Andrew Li, Emily Taylor, Jackson Whiteley, and Emma Zhang.
These academically talented seniors at Jenks High School now have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 6,930 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 20,000 high schools entered the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2024 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 2026 will be announced between April and July. These scholarship recipients will join more than 389,000 other distinguished young people to earn the Merit Scholar title.