Princeton University

I

Introduction

Princeton University, private, coeducational institution of higher education, one of the oldest in the United States, located in Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton is a member of the Ivy League, a group of prestigious schools in the eastern United States.

II

History

The university was chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. First located in Elizabeth (1746), and later in Newark (1747), the college moved to Princeton in 1756. The college was officially renamed Princeton University in 1896. Among its notable alumni are United States president James Madison (1809-1817), one of the framers of the Constitution of the United States; U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), who was also a professor at Princeton and served as university president from 1902 to 1910; Supreme Court justices Oliver Ellsworth, John M. Harlan, and Samuel Alito; the author and critic Edmund Wilson; writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill; and basketball player and U.S. senator Bill Bradley.

III

Undergraduate Activities

Since 1905 the university has used the preceptorial system of instruction, in which formal lectures are supplemented by meetings between professors or instructors and small groups of students. Most first- and second-year students are assigned to residential colleges, where they live, eat, and socialize.

IV

The Graduate School

Princeton’s graduate school was established in 1901. It offers doctoral programs in engineering, the humanities, mathematics, the natural sciences, and the social sciences.

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