<p>hsmom – As a long-time reader of this forum, and as someone who has known a variety of Princeton students and faculty over the years, although the last student I really knew at all graduated in 2009, I would say the following:</p>
<p>By and large, Princeton students love Princeton. In fact, Princeton students seem to love Princeton more than any other college’s students love it – alumni engagement at Princeton is in a category of its own, far beyond that of any other college I know. Yale students love Yale – I certainly did – but I don’t know anyone who wishes there were class reunions every single year, while I have some Princeton friends who skip their annual reunion only under extreme duress. In part because of Princeton’s location in farthest suburbia, and the small size of the university relative to its peers, undergraduates are focused on one-another in ways that aren’t always true at other Ivies (besides Dartmouth), and it shows in the intensity of their friendships. Also, the eating-club system, which strikes many outsiders as questionable/unpleasant, seems to work for the vast majority of students and to enhance their college social experience considerably.</p>
<p>I might speculate that the sense of contentment at Princeton is enhanced because it tends to attract relatively self-satisfied students to begin with. Students who see themselves as future revolutionaries or social reformers are, historically, not Princeton types; I think they apply there less, are accepted less, and choose to attend less than at any of the equivalent universities. I don’t want to overstate that, though. Princeton definitely has some students like that – and the ones I know have loved Princeton just as much as the Ivy Club future oligarchs.</p>
<p>Not everyone in love is “happy”, though, at least not all the time. Princeton is hard – it may place more demands on its students than any equivalent college, except maybe MIT and Caltech, or the University of Chicago. Practically all students find themselves taken down a notch or two at the outset, and have to deal with that, and a few students have a really tough time of it. That’s pretty much true of every elite college, but I think it happens a little more often and a little harder at Princeton than it does at Yale or Stanford, and a little differently than it does at Harvard. At Harvard, I think some students feel anxious about living up to their image of what Harvard means. At Princeton, the anxious students are anxious because they are afraid they might fail . . . and they might. That may be part of why Princeton alumni feel so strongly about it: You can graduate from Harvard or Yale and still feel like a fraud who hasn’t been caught yet, but almost everyone who makes it through Princeton feels like he or she has really accomplished something.</p>
<p>I sometimes needle my Princeton friends, in real life and on CC. But I truly believe that if a kid has a chance to go to Princeton – i.e., has been accepted – he or she couldn’t possibly make a mistake by going there. There may be other colleges that are more wonderful in some counting-angels-on-a-pinhead way (I think there are), but Princeton is far more than wonderful enough to fulfill anyone’s dreams. I don’t know anyone who went to Princeton who wishes he or she had made a different choice. And there are hardly any colleges about which I would make the same statement.</p>