Princeton boasts over 97,000 living alumni and over 8,700 current undergraduate and graduate students. Nearly 90,000 profiles appear in the alumni tab for Princeton on the social network LinkedIn, which would indicate that over 84 percent of these people hold accounts, if all of the accounts on this tab are students or alumni. We looked at the LinkedIn accounts of these users to see in what fields they work, which companies employ them, and where they reside. While surveys show many recent graduates go into finance and consulting, the most common fields for the users were business development, education, and research.
Only 6,441 users, 6 percent of the total, reported ending their affiliation with Princeton more than 50 years ago, indicating the majority of Princeton LinkedIn users could be valuable networking resources to current students.
Princeton alumni in New York, California, and New Jersey account for over 47 percent of all alumni on LinkedIn. This is more than the number of students who reported living in these states before they came to Princeton. Only 36 percent of the Class of 2026 were from New York, California, and New Jersey.
The high percentage aligns with the membership data reported by Princeton alumni associations in these regions. The Princeton Association of New York City (PANYC), the NYC alumni association, boasts 10,205 members. The Princeton Club of South California is the third largest alumni region after the Princeton area, with 3,940 members.
LinkedIn launched in May of 2003, and over 60 percent of Princeton alumni on LinkedIn graduated after its founding. 1957 is the first year in which over 100 LinkedIn members ended their affiliation with Princeton, possibly indicating they members of the Class of 1957. 1989 is the first graduating class that lists over 1000 alumni on LinkedIn.
A significant drop of new alumni occurred between 2020 and 2021, possibly due to many students taking a leave of absence from the University due to COVID-19.
According to The Daily Princetonian’s Senior Survey for the Class of 2023, 19 percent of the Class of 2023 planned to attend graduate school or enter academia. Of the remaining 72 percent, the most common career paths were finance, consulting and software engineering. About nine percent of 2023 graduates were undecided on their career path according to our survey.
Some professions are popular among younger alumni but less so among the broader alumni population. Consulting, for example, is a top five career field in both the 2022 and 2023 Senior Survey, but is the 11th most prominent over all Princeton alumni. Medicine and public service are also fields that many students report on the Senior Surveys, but are otherwise not as popular among alumni.
Our analysis shows that among Princeton alumni and students on LinkedIn, business development, education, and research are the most popular lines of work. This data is likely skewed by research done during undergraduate years.
According to the University’s Health Professions Advising (HPA) office, 83 percent of medical school applicants from Princeton between 2018 and 2022 were accepted into at least one U.S. or Canadian medical school, totaling 559 students. These figures align with the Senior Survey results from both 2022 and 2023, but LinkedIn data shows a far lower percentage of alumni in the medical field, of around 3900 alumni in Healthcare Services, 4.3 percent of all LinkedIn alumni, compared to over 10 percent of the most recent class years.
Princeton University is the largest employer of alumni and students, with close to 3 percent of all alumni and students having worked for the University at one point in their career, as a student or as alumni. Many of the other common employers are major technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, and several are consulting companies like McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group. The ‘Prince’ is the tenth most common employer, with 0.18 percent of alumni and students listing the publication as an employer, with nearly every listing from a current student or graduate in the past three years.
A large number of alumni are in fields of business, research and finance. The second largest career field, education, is similarly reflected across the alumni LinkedIn pages of all other Ivy League institutions except for Cornell University, where Operations is the second largest career field then followed by education.
The most common university where Princeton alumni have been employed is Princeton itself by far, followed by Columbia, Penn, and Stanford. Mirroring the location data of alumni, most alumni employed by universities work at schools in the coastal regions of the country. The most common university for alumni employment not on either U.S. coast is the University of Chicago, the 15th most popular school for alumni employment. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has employed over 130 alumni, but within the research field, not education.
Harvard Medical School is the only hospital and medical school that is a common alumni employer within the education field. Other common healthcare systems include Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and University of California, San Francisco.
In the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent year for which data from the Registrar is available, the most common concentration was Computer Science. Combined with Computational Science, a LinkedIn major option most closely related to Computer Science, Computer Science accounts for the majors of over 10 percent of both the 2021-2022 upperclass student population and all Princeton alumni on LinkedIn.
Princeton alumni represent a diverse population, spread across the United States and the world, and spanning many career fields and companies.
Andrew Bosworth is an assistant Data editor for the ‘Prince’.
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com
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