History and Purpose
After James Madison graduated from Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) in 1771, he chose to remain for a year of “graduate work” to study Hebrew with President John Witherspoon. In the following decades, other promising graduates also stayed on, but it was not until 1869 that graduate education at Princeton formally begin to take shape. In that year, three fellowships were established to encourage outstanding members of the senior class to continue their studies in classics, mathematics, and philosophy. In 1879, Princeton conferred its first earned doctorates on James F. Williamson and William Libby (both B.A. 1877).
This modest beginning established several enduring principles; foremost among them the careful selection of candidates, a wide latitude for the students in their programs of study, easy accessibility of the faculty, and a willingness to experiment. These principles have governed the evolution of the Graduate School at Princeton since its establishment in 1900.
The primary purpose of the Graduate School is to prepare scholars and researchers to master the content and methods of their special subjects, such that they are fully prepared to find and widely communicate new knowledge. After completing an intensive program of study, graduates should be able to claim professional standing in their chosen fields. Thus the larger design of graduate education at Princeton is to establish the individual’s permanent relationship to learning.
The modern Graduate School spans 38 departments and programs, from the humanities, across the social and natural sciences, to engineering, with a balance between Ph.D. and professional degree programs; the latter being primarily found in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Policy), the School of Architecture (Master of Architecture), the School of Engineering and Applied Science (Master of Science in Engineering and Master of Engineering), and the Bendheim Center for Finance (Master of Finance). Each of these programs couple graduate students with outstanding scholars on the faculty, who lead them to the forefront of their field through graduate courses that both teach the fundamentals and provide glimpses of the current frontiers in all disciplines, through highly interactive and topical seminars in the humanities and social sciences, and through early incorporation into research groups in the sciences and engineering.
Overlying the disciplines stretch a network of interdisciplinary programs, institutes, and centers that lure students beyond their departments to explore topics that transcend disciplines, e.g., bridging between classics and philosophy, politics and history, sociology and Near Eastern studies, physics and materials, or chemical engineering and molecular biology, in order to address current issues of widespread importance and fundamental interest. The objective is to educate students soundly in a discipline while keeping them cognizant of important issues that transcend disciplines, thereby equipping them to become leaders in academia, government, and the private and non-profit sectors.