PRINCETON N.J.
With a $136 million complex of Collegiate Gothic-style stone buildings that feature huge, mahogany-trimmed dorm rooms, an art gallery and a 65-seat theater, Princeton University is preparing for its biggest increase in undergraduate enrollment since it started admitting women.
The university wants to use the added capacity to add more diversity to a campus that’s one of the most prestigious places in higher education.
Princeton has ranked in at least a tie for first in the U.S. News and World Report rankings of the best universities for each of the past eight years. It accepts only about 10 percent of the nearly 19,000 students who apply each year.
“By growing the student body, we’ll be able to draw a little more fully on the talent in the pool,” said Nancy Malkiel, Princeton’s dean of the College “We think too that if we have the capacity to educated a few more students, it would be a public service to do that.”
Adding more student living quarters will mean that in the next few years, 125 students who would have been rejected in the past will end up going to the Ivy League school. Under the plan, by 2012, undergraduate enrollment will be about 5,200 up from the current 4,700.
University officials say the higher enrollment can come without compromising Princeton’s high academic standards and without hiring additional faculty.
