Princeton University

Princeton University is located in Princeton, New Jersey. It is a private not-for-profit, 4-year or above institution.

From Wikipedia: Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark in 1747 and then to its Mercer County campus in Princeton nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University. The university is governed by the Trustees of Princeton University and has an endowment of $37.7 billion, the largest endowment per student in the United States. Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering to approximately 8,500 students on its main campus spanning 600 acres (2.4 km2) within the borough of Princeton. It offers postgraduate degrees through the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Architecture and the Bendheim Center for Finance. The university also manages the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and is home to the NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity” and has one of the largest university libraries in the world. Princeton uses a residential college system and is known for its eating clubs for juniors and seniors. The university has over 500 student organizations. Princeton students embrace a wide variety of traditions from both the past and present. The university is an NCAA Division I school and competes in the Ivy League. The school’s athletic team, the Princeton Tigers, has won the most titles in its conference and has sent many students and alumni to the Olympics. As of October 2021, 75 Nobel laureates, 16 Fields Medalists and 16 Turing Award laureates have been affiliated with Princeton University as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, Princeton has been associated with 21 National Medal of Science awardees, 5 Abel Prize awardees, 11 National Humanities Medal recipients, 217 Rhodes Scholars, 137 Marshall Scholars, and 62 Gates Cambridge Scholars. Two United States presidents, twelve United States Supreme Court justices (three of whom serve on the court as of 2010) and numerous living industry and media tycoons and foreign heads of state are all counted among Princeton’s alumni body. Princeton has graduated many members of the United States Congress and the United States Cabinet, including eight secretaries of state, three secretaries of defense and two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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Overview of institution

This, and the rest of the page, use info from the most recent year available, generally 2023.

  • Institution kind: Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity

  • Undergrad program: Arts & sciences plus professions, high graduate coexistence

  • Graduate program: Research Doctoral: Comprehensive programs, no medical/veterinary school

  • Enrollment profile: Majority undergraduate (see more details below)

  • Average net price for undergrads on financial aid: $18,698 . This is 100% the average cost of Harvard.

  • Actual price for your family: Go here to see what your family may be asked to pay. It can be MUCH lower than the average price but also higher for some.

  • Size and setting: Four-year, medium, highly residential

  • In state percentage: 16% of first year students come from New Jersey

  • In US percentage: 85% of first year students come from the US

  • Graduation rate (within 6 years) for students seeking a Bachelors: 97.3% (this is what is usually reported as “graduation rate”)

  • Graduation rate (within 4 years) for students seeking a Bachelors: 88.1%

  • Student to tenure-stream faculty ratio: 6.9 (undergrads to tenure-stream faculty) [Tenure explained]

  • Student to faculty ratio: 5.4 (undergrads to all faculty)

  • Degrees offered: Certificate of less than 1 year, Certificate of at least 12 weeks but less than 1 year, Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, Doctor’s degree: research scholarship

  • Schedule: Semester

  • Institution provides on campus housing: Yes

  • Dorm capacity: There are enough dorm beds for 5594 students

  • Freshmen required to live on campus: Yes

  • Advanced placement (AP) credits used: Yes

  • Disabilities: 4.80 percent of undergrads are registered as having disabilities.

Map

Comparisons

The sections below show this institution compared with others. The ones listed are ones it has identified as peers, who consider themselves peers, and/or who the federal government considers peers. If a comparison school has the same value as the focal school, its cell is grayed out. In fields where there is a common view that higher (or lower) values are better, the best values are in blue, the worst values are in red. If there isn’t a sense of a particular value being better, values are shown in varying shades of green. Arrows show where there is a signficant trend over time for a school. You can swipe across the table to see more of it; the focal school column is always visible.

Enrollment

General

Teaching

Tenure track faculty are those who are eligible for tenure. This includes both pre-tenure and tenured faculty. Once faculty get tenure, they are (generally) protected from being fired for intellectual reasons, helping to ensure their freedom in teaching and research. They can still lose their positions for misconduct, financial problems, not fulfilling their duties, or other reasons.

Non-tenure track faculty are not eligible for tenure. Some are hired one semester at a time, some have multi-year contracts. They typically have a higher teaching load than tenure track faculty, leaving less time for research or other creative endeavors. They are also easier to fire than tenured faculty. Sometimes they are external experts (a noted musician, a former senator) who are hired to teach some classes without the expected permanence of a tenure-track position.

Note that this chart uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.

Having a low student to faculty ratio is considered a good thing by many, as it can mean more individual attention.

Geography

This has information on the location of the institution. See the about page for more information on what the metrics are and how they are calculated.

Financial Aid

Graduation

Note these are bachelors graduation rates in six years, not four (this is standard). Sample sizes can be small for some demographic groups with few individuals in a school, leading to large year-to-year fluctuations and often extreme values for those groups (if there are two individuals in the class with a given identity, the possible graduation rates are 0%, 50%, or 100% depending on whether zero, one, or both students graduate within six years).

Library

Libraries are changing rapidly. Note that how institutions count digital collections may vary.

Diversity

The US Census Bureau has a diversity index that goes from 0 to 1. In their words, “A 0-value indicates that everyone in the population has the same racial and ethnic characteristics. A value close to 1 indicates that everyone in the population has different racial and ethnic characteristics.” This uses their formula, but with the resolution available for the federal IPEDS data (which does not separate for a given demographic group whether members identify as Hispanic or not). This metric is about heterogeneity within the population, not the proportion of the population that comes from historically excluded groups.

Following the practice of the census, the index is multiplied by 100 to give the percentage probability a random pair of individuals will have a different background. Most institutions argue that diversity is a benefit, so by default a higher number is listed as better, but there may be cases where this measure does not reflect the mission of a college (for example, 70% of the students at a tribal college or university may be American Indian: that could be low-scoring by this metric but should not be read as “bad” given the institution’s mission).

These numbers are based on the most recent year available, generally 2023, which predates effects of the US Supreme Court’s striking down of affirmative action. This has often changed, sometimes dramatically, the incoming student demographics at some institutions.

Overall diversity

Freshman profile

Demographic data for first time degree-seeking students. Note that this uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.

Freshman geography

Test scores

SAT scores

ACT scores

Majors

This presents information on the number of majors and the median earnings one and five years after graduation for people who got a degree from this institution in that field. The earnings are for those who are working and not enrolled in further education. The earnings data (from the federal college scorecard) also has information on earnings for those categorized as ‘MALE’ and ‘NOMALE’ – for readability, these are recategorized here as “Men” and “Women”, respectively, which adopts the gender binary used in other federal data. “W/M earnings ratio” is the median earnings of women divided by men, as a percentage.

Bachelors

Masters

Doctorate

Certificate

Associates