The National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced that 27 Lake Washington School District high school seniors have qualified as semifinalists in the 58th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

Nine of those students live in Sammamish.

Four Eastlake students made the semifinal list, including Rachel Ainslie, Felipe Concha, Andrew Garland and Ajay Palekar.

Additionally, five other Sammamish students were added to the list, including Smrithi Sukumar (International School), Alexander Ronneburg (Redmond High), Joshua Ye (Redmond High), Samvit Jain (Redmond High) and Frank Qu (Redmond High).

A total of 16,000 academically talented high school seniors nationwide have qualified. These students will have the opportunity to continue in the competition for some 8,400 National Merit Scholarships, worth more than $32 million, that will be offered next spring.

Students qualified for these awards by completing the 2011 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, which represents less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.