<p>I know the US News Report Rankings mean nothing at all, but I was perusing some of the metrics, and it seems that Princeton's overall class size certainly caught my eye vis-a-vis its peers. It's 2017 class size was only around 8,000 kids, whilst Duke's for instance was around 15,000. Harvard's class size was around 20,000. Is there a reason why Princeton's class size is so low? Is there an on-campus housing problem or is it leveraged to put downward pressure on the admit rate? </p>
<p>Your numbers are completely off. When you say “class of 2017” no idea what you mean. Comparing apples and apples, ie undergraduate enrollment, the numbers you quote I believe are total undergrad/graduate. Princeton has no professional schools (medicine, law, business, etc) and is very undergrad focused which is a huge positive for the undergrads at least. The benefits of a big research university but most of the focus on undergrads. Princeton has about 5000 undergrads, Harvard and Yale more like 8000 I believe. Only Cornell has over 10,000 (15,000).</p>