Jewish enrollment at Princeton University has dropped by nearly 40 per cent in the last 15 years, a trend that has some faculty members concerned and a few pointing a finger of blame at the university’s admissions director. Princeton administrators defend the admissions process and attribute the drop to nationwide declines in the number of Jewish students going to college.
The issue was raised in an article Tuesday in The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper. The article, which called the decline “Princeton’s best-kept open secret,” cited figures showing that Jewish students make up about 10 per cent of this year’s freshman class, down from 16 per cent of the class that entered Princeton in 1985. The 10-per-cent figure is significantly lower than the proportions of Jewish students at some of the institutions Princeton sees as its peers. Twenty-one per cent of the undergraduates at Harvard University are Jewish, 29 per cent at Yale, and 22 per cent at Brown, according to Hillel, a Jewish-student organization that keeps tabs on Jewish enrollments on U.S. campuses.
“It’s quite clear we’re not succeeding in keeping the same number of Jewish students coming in,” said Anthony Grafton, a professor of history and a member of the faculty committee on admissions, which advises the dean of admissions, Fred Hargadon.
Many things have changed at Princeton since the days when it purposely shunned Jewish students, and even professors who are concerned about the recent decline acknowledge that the university has done much in the last few years to welcome Jewish students, including creating a Center for Jewish Life. But some faculty members believe that Princeton has at least stopped seeking out Jewish students, in part by aggressively recruiting minority students and students from less-populous geographic areas.
“We’ve had real support when trying to get the academic side going,” but bringing in Jewish students to fill new programs isn’t a priority, said Froma I. Zeitlin, a professor of classics and the director of the Jewish-studies program Princeton started three years ago.
“They have de-selected Jewish students by setting other kinds of priorities” in recruitment, said Ms. Zeitlin.
A spokesman for the university defended the admissions process as fair and unbiased, and said that decisions are made based on academic and extracurricular achievements, not on religious affiliation. “The university doesn’t ask” about an applicant’s religion, said Justin Harmon, the spokesman. “It’s essentially a blind process.”
“We shouldn’t want a process that tagged members of particular groups,” he said.
Mr. Hargadon could not be reached for comment. But in an interview with the Princetonian, he cited statistics showing that the number of Jewish applicants as a percentage of students applying to colleges nationally had been cut in half. Princeton’s president, Harold Shapiro, told the student newspaper that the drop was a “mystery” to him.
