Princeton University 7th University of the world 2016

Princeton University is one of the oldest universities in the US and is regarded as one of the world’s most illustrious higher education institutions.

Founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it was officially renamed Princeton University in 1896 in honour of the area where it is based, opening its famous graduate school in 1900.

Acclaimed for its commitment to teaching, the Ivy League institution offers residential accommodation to all of its undergraduates across all four years of study, with 98 per cent of undergraduates living on campus.

Its student body is relatively small, with fewer than 10,000 in total, and international students make up 12 per cent of undergraduates.

Princeton is also one of the world’s foremost research universities with connections to more than 40 Nobel laureates, 17 winners of the National Medal of Science and five recipients of the National Humanities Medal.

Faculty members who have been awarded a Nobel prize in recent years include chemists Tomas Lindahl and Osamu Shimomura, economists Paul Krugman and Angus Deaton and physicists Arthur McDonald and David Gross.

Notable alumni who have won a Nobel prize include the physicists Richard Feynman and Robert Hofstadter and chemists Richard Smalley and Edwin McMillan.

Princeton has also educated two US presidents, James Madison and Woodrow Wilson, who was also the university’s president prior to entering the White House. Other distinguished graduates include Michelle Obama, actors Jimmy Stewart and Brooke Shields, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad.

Princeton, which is consistently ranked among the world’s top 10 universities, is renowned for its campus’ park-like beauty as well as some of its landmark buildings, designed by some of America’s most well-known architects. For instance, its Lewis Library was designed by Frank Gehry and contains many of the university’s science collections. Its McCarter Theatre Center has won a Tony Award for the best regional theatre in the country.

Spread across 500 acres, the Princeton campus has about 180 buildings, including 10 libraries containing about 14 million holdings. It is popular with visitors, with about 800,000 people visiting its open campus each year, generating about $2 billion in revenue.

The Princeton area, which has a population of about 30,000 residents, is also something of a destination itself, with many attracted by its tree-lined streets and wide variety of shops, restaurants and parks.

The university is within easy reach of both New York City and Philadelphia, with the “Dinky” shuttle train providing a regular service lasting about one hour to both cities. Princeton regularly subsidises many student trips to concerts, plays and athletic events in the two cities.

Admissions and financial aid

Princeton's undergraduate program is highly selective, admitting 7.28% of undergraduate applicants in the 2014-2015 admissions cycle (for the Class of 2018).  In September 2006, the university announced that all applicants for the Class of 2012 would be considered in a single pool, effectively ending the school's early decision program.  In February 2011, following decisions by the University of Virginia and Harvard University to reinstate their early admissions programs, Princeton announced it would institute an early action program, starting with applicants for the Class of 2016. In 2011, The Business Journal rated Princeton as the most selective college in the Eastern United States in terms of admission selectivity.

In 2001, expanding on earlier reforms, Princeton became the first university to eliminate loans for all students who qualify for financial aid.  All demonstrated need is met with combinations of grants and campus jobs. In addition, all admissions are need-blind.  U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review both cite Princeton as the university that has the fewest of graduates with debt even though 60% of incoming students are on some type of financial aid  Kiplinger magazine ranks Princeton as the best value among private universities, noting that the average graduating debt is US$4,957, "about one fifth the average debt of students who borrow at all private schools".

Grade deflation policy

In 2004, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, the Dean of the College, implemented a grade deflation policy to curb the number of A-range grades undergraduates received.  Malkiel's argument was that an A was beginning to lose its meaning as a larger percentage of the student body received them.  While the number of A's has indeed decreased under the policy, many argue that this is hurting Princeton students when they apply to jobs or graduate school.  Malkiel has said that she sent pamphlets to inform institutions about the policy so that they consider Princeton students equally, but students argue that Princeton graduates can apply to other institutions that know nothing about it. They argue further that as other schools purposefully inflate their grades, Princeton students' GPAs will look low by comparison. Further, studies have shown that employers prefer high grades even when they are inflated. The policy remained in place even after Malkiel stepped down at the end of the 2010–2011 school year. The policy deflates grades only relative to their previous levels; indeed, as of 2009, or five years after the policy was instituted, the average graduating GPA saw a marginal decrease, from 3.46 to 3.39.

In August 2014, a faculty committee tasked by President Eisgruber to review the effectiveness of grade deflation found not only that the 35% target was both often misinterpreted as a hard quota and applied inconsistently across departments, but also that grades had begun to decline in 2003, the year before the policy was implemented. The committee concluded that the observed lower grades since 2003 were the result of discussions and increased awareness during and since the implementation of the deflation policy, and not the deflation targets themselves, so recommended removing the numerical targets while charging individual departments with developing consistent standards for grading. In October 2014, following a faculty vote, the numerical targets were removed as recommended by the committee.

Graduate

The Graduate School has about 2,600 students in 42 academic departments and programs in social sciences, engineering, natural sciences, and humanities. In 2012–13, it received over 11,000 applications for admission and awarded 319 Ph.D. degrees and 170 final master's degrees. Princeton has no medical school, law school, or business school. (A short-lived Princeton Law School folded in 1852.) It offers professional graduate degrees in architecture, engineering, finance, and public policy, the last through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, founded in 1930 as the School of Public and International Affairs and renamed in 1948 after university president (and U.S. President) Woodrow Wilson.

Libraries

The Princeton University Library system houses over eleven million holdings including seven million bound volumes. The main university library, Firestone Library, which houses almost four million volumes, is one of the largest university libraries in the world. Additionally, it is among the largest "open stack" libraries in existence. Its collections include the autographed manuscript of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and George F. Kennan's Long Telegram. In addition to Firestone library, specialized libraries exist for architecture, art and archaeology, East Asian studies, engineering, music, public and international affairs, public policy and University archives, and the sciences. In an effort to expand access, these libraries also subscribe to thousands of electronic resources. In February 2007, Princeton became the 12th major library system to join Google's ambitious project to scan the world's great literary works and make them searchable over the Web.

Rankings

 From 2001 to 2016, Princeton University was ranked either first or second among national universities by U.S. News & World Report (USNWR), holding the top spot for 14 of those 16 years (sole #1 nine times, #1 tied with Harvard five times). Princeton was ranked first in the most recent 2016 U.S. News rankings, as well as #1 in the 2015 and 2016 rankings for "best undergraduate teaching." In the 2014–15 Times Higher Education assessment of the world's greatest universities, Princeton was ranked 7th.  In the 2014/15 QS World University Rankings,^[128] it was ranked 9th overall in the world and 5th among US universities.

In the "America's Top Colleges" rankings by Forbes in 2014, Princeton University was ranked fourth among all national colleges and universities, after holding the number one position for a number of years.

In the 2015 U.S. News & World Report "Graduate School Rankings", all thirteen of Princeton's doctoral programs evaluated were ranked in their respective top 20, 8 of them in the top 5, and 4 of them in the top spot (Economics, History, Mathematics, Sociology).

In Princeton Review's rankings of "softer" aspects of students' college experience, Princeton University was ranked first in "Students Happy with Financial Aid" and third in "Happiest Students", behind Clemson and Brown.

Princeton was ranked the 360th top college in the United States by Payscale and CollegeNet's Social Mobility Index college rankings.

Princeton was ranked 7th among 300 Best World Universities in 2011 compiled by Human Resources & Labor Review (HRLR) on Measurements of World's Top 300 Universities Graduates' Performance .

Princeton University has an IBM BlueGeneL supercomputer, called Orangena, which was ranked as the 89th fastest computer in the world in 2005 (LINPACK performance of 4713 compared to 12250 for other U.S. universities and 280600 for the top-ranked supercomputer, belonging to the U.S. Department of Energy).