The Most Popular Names of This Year’s College Freshmen
A university’s roster of new students is a time capsule of popular baby names from 18 years earlier, with telling variations reflecting the school’s particularities.
When Laura Wattenberg dropped her daughter off at college late last month, she got distracted. The freshman residence halls displayed “a hand-painted banner welcoming new students by name,” Wattenberg recalls. All she wanted to do was “stop and take notes on the name lists,” she told me in an email.
Wattenberg is the self-titled , best known for her popular baby-name guidebooks and her blog, where she analyzes naming trends. She couldn’t resist scanning the huge cloth banners, and noticed patterns in “the evocative collection” of names. “The
