Princeton Admissions

Recently you published a letter (Dec. 27) from Jon E. Currie in which he purports that at a college night at the L.A. Convention Center sometime last year his son was told by a representative of Princeton that he would have a “tough time” gaining admission if he weren’t a minority student. It just isn’t conceivable that anyone familiar with Princeton’s admission policies and practices could have made such a remark.

Moreover, it would come as a great surprise to the many California students from non-minority backgrounds who are currently enrolled at colleges and universities in the east, including Princeton, to learn that, according to Currie, it is only minority students that such colleges are interested in recruiting and enrolling from that state.

Princeton, like many other colleges, recruits, admits, and enrolls students of every sort of background from California. When our staff travels to California, we visit inner-city schools and suburban and rural schools. We visit public, parochial and independent schools. We are represented at college nights that are attended largely by students from middle-class or more affluent backgrounds and college nights that are attended largely by students from disadvantaged, inner-city, or minority backgrounds.

We are interested in making sure that able students from a wide diversity of backgrounds learn about the opportunities available at Princeton. In those areas throughout the country (including California) where there are significant concentrations of students whose backgrounds have generally precluded their being as knowledgeable or as aware of the full range of higher education opportunities in general, or of schools like Princeton in particular, we make special efforts to reach out to such students. We make no apologies for that. While it comes as no surprise that worthy efforts of this sort by colleges and universities are not greeted with universal acclaim, it is grossly misleading to depict such efforts on our part to promote equal opportunity as attempts to do just the opposite.

While we make every effort to enroll a student body that is both able and diverse, there are no quotas of any sort. We evaluate applications individually and make our best judgments about the extent to which each candidate would take advantage of, benefit from, and contribute to the undergraduate program offered by the university.

FRED A. HARGADON

Dean of Admission

Princeton University