Princeton University

Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey. 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 the current site nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University.

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In brief, Princeton is a wealthy, private, research university of high standing with a long history. It is located in a largely affluent suburban community that is home to a number of highly educated people associated with knowledge-intensive institutions such as ETS (Educational Testing Service) and the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as Princeton, Rutgers, and other colleges and secondary schools. The university is residential, operates at a relatively small scale, and is highly selective at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The undergraduate college was all male until it became coeducational in 1969—a change that occurred a few years earlier at the graduate level. It has a famously loyal (some would say "fanatically loyal") alumni body.
- William G. Bowen: Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President. Princeton University Press. 2010. p. 4.

Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts... Here the people who compose what is called 'society' enjoy even less freedom than their counterparts in Europe. Yet they seem unaware of this restriction, since their way of life tends to inhibit personality development from childhood.
- Albert Einstein (1933) quote in "Rambling Around Princeton, the Best Little Book-Town in America" on The Washington Post.

Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, and Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.
- Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin: 2005), pp. 549-550

Fields medalists are nothing out of the ordinary at Princeton—you sometimes find yourself seated next to three or four of them at lunch!
- Cédric Villani (5 March 2015). Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure. Random House. pp. 70. ISBN 978-1-4481-5657-3.