Publication: A Princeton Companion
Enrollment in the College of New Jersey when President Jonathan Dickinson began instruction in his Elizabethtown parsonage in 1747 probably numbered not more than ten students. During the College's first twenty-one years, the 338 students in attendance came from all but two of the thirteen colonies. Although the majority lived in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, more than a quarter were from New England, and a fair number from the South, thus putting the College ``on the way to becoming a national institution well before there was a nation.''*
After 1768, President Witherspoon was particularly successful in attracting students from the South, where earlier graduates had formed strong Princeton influences as ministers and teachers. Under Witherspoon, the College enjoyed a cosmopolitan flavor, with students ``not only from almost every province,'' Philip Fithian 1771 wrote in his senior year, ``but . . . also many from the West Indies & some few from Europe.''
Enrollment reached 314 by 1860 and then fell off during and after the Civil War. It resumed its upward trend under President McCosh, with the number of undergraduates doubling in his administration and again in President Patton's and rising steadily under Presidents Wilson (1,289), Hibben (2,279), Dodds (2,948), and Goheen (3,903). In later years this rise was a controlled one, based on a policy of limited enrollment and selective admission adopted in 1922.
The Civil War reduced the flow of students from the South, and although they never regained their numerical prominenc~e -- at times half the student body had been southern -- the general enrollment rise later in the century brought with it a proportionate increase in the number of southern students. Appreciable enrollments from the Middle West began in the 1880s and from the Far West in the 1920s. Although the largest number of undergraduates, as of 1976, continued to come from New York (917), New Jersey (767), and Pennsylvania (442), there were substantial enrollments from states in New England, the South, the Middle West, the Southwest, and the Far West. In those regions the states with the largest enrollments were Massachusetts (302), Virginia (129), Illinois (94), Texas (124), and California (156), respectively.
Until the 1870s Princeton's enrollment was entirely undergraduate except for occasional non-degree postgraduate students. The number of candidates for higher degrees steadily increased under President McCosh, and by the time the Graduate School was formally established in 1901 there were 117. After the First World War, enrollment in the Graduate School was limited to 200, and then 250, but following the Second World War, a policy of controlled expansion was adopted, allowing a marked rise in the number enrolled.
A considerable influx of students from other countries after the Second World War added to the cosmopolitan character of the student body. In 1976 approximately 4 percent of the undergraduates and 22 percent of the graduate students came from outside the United States.
Two University decisions in the 1960s further increased the diversity of student enrollment: the adoption of an active recruitment policy for blacks and other minority groups, and the decision to admit women to the Graduate School and later to the undergraduate college.
By 1976, total student enrollment had grown to 5,775, with representatives from every state in the Union and from seventy countries on six continents. It consisted of 4,360 undergraduates, including 1,395 women, 346 blacks, and 351 members of other minority groups; and 1,415 graduate students, including 367 women, 38 blacks, and 185 representing other minority groups.
Earle E. Coleman
*James McLachlan, Princetonians 1748-1768; A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton University Press, 1976).
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).