The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
In his editorial “What is a Princeton degree really for?” written this past spring, Joel Ibabao ’27 treated a Princeton education as a private asset meant to be optimized for one’s own gain. This approach correctly recognizes that “finding oneself” at college can only take precedence over positioning oneself on the job market if financial security is a given.
But these personal considerations — finding yourself or achieving economic security — should not be the only ones.
What Ibabao misses is that a Princeton education is aided immensely by the generosity of the University endowment and broader social compact between the federal government and society at large. Those few of us privileged to come out with those elite degrees, thus, are deeply indebted to the public.
Many institutional and public investments make our education possible. Princeton and other private universities are generally exempt from taxes, a form of public subsidy that recognizes their operations “as fundamental to fostering the productive and civic capacity of its citizens,” as the Association of American Universities argues.
This, along with the generosity of alumni donors, provided the seed for Princeton and its peers to rack up enormous endowments, which provide generous financial aid packages for their students and allow for spending to attract scholars and researchers who are in the top of their field globally.
This results in a deeply unequal distribution of research, talent, and opportunity among American universities. In the fiscal year 2023, just over 60 universities received over a third of the $60 billion disbursed by the federal government for research spending. This represents less than a tenth of the 650 colleges and universities in the United States that received at least $1 million in federal funding.
The inequality is more pronounced the further up you go. The Ivy League alone received over $8.7 billion of federal research funding, meaning just eight universities in the United States receive more than one-eighth of all disbursed federal research dollars. In a positive feedback loop, this further cements their reputation as some of the most desirable places to get an education and to conduct research.
The funding Princeton receives has a material effect on the quality of the undergraduate academic experience at Princeton. Not only are Princeton students taught by instructors that are among the top of their field, every single student works directly with these faculty in their independent work. But this access to a world-class faculty — as well as an influential alumni network — is rooted in a deep structural inequality that concentrates resources and talent from not only within the United States but around the world.
Ibabao writes of his childhood in the Philippines, where even access to primary and secondary education is uncertain. As an international student myself, I am acutely aware of the privilege of attending a university like Princeton. This is an opportunity many equally deserving students from my home country will never access, whether due to language barriers, a lack of opportunities that even Princeton’s need-blind admissions policies cannot correct, or just worse luck in the incredibly competitive rat-race of elite college admissions. This further supports the case for using our degrees not only to improve our own lives, but to serve others as well.
So while Ibabao is right that for many students from lower-income backgrounds, there is a familial responsibility to earn money, overlooking our responsibility to the public is no small error. The social and moral responsibility that comes with receiving a degree subsidized by both private generosity and public trust is significant.
Rather than diminishing the moral weight of career decisions, Princetonians’ relative insulation from financial strain ought to deepen it.
Princeton’s generous financial aid policy means the average net cost of tuition is less than $11,000 for aid recipients in the Class of 2028. Even those who borrow will, on average, graduate with among the lowest rates of student debt among four-year colleges in the United States. Further, undergraduates can access research and internship funding that many other universities simply do not have the budget for.
And the personal financial return on this reduced investment is significant. Ten years after graduation, the average Princeton alum is making more than double the national average for college graduates.
This relative insulation from financial stress should enable Princeton students to choose their career paths more freely and to choose more responsibly. Shouldn’t this freedom entail a greater obligation? If Princeton students are among the few in the world privileged enough to pursue education with reduced immediate pressure of debt or job insecurity, should that not translate into a deeper commitment to careers that are, as Princeton’s informal motto puts it, “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity?”
At a time when elite private universities, especially the Ivy League, have come under intense scrutiny for their role in American society, it is more important than ever to recognize what we owe to our society as beneficiaries of the privilege of attending such an institution.
The abundance of academic and pre-professional opportunities that underpin Princeton’s prestige are made possible by substantial resources that should not be taken for granted. In response to the Trump administration’s funding cuts and threats to the academic freedom of universities, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 wrote that American leadership in research is sustained by an agreement between the federal government and universities: the federal government puts taxpayer money into universities in return for their contribution to the nation’s development and prosperity.
In a similar way, the academic and intellectual excellence among America’s universities is sustained by an implicit societal agreement that the resources poured into our education will be repaid, not just in personal gain, but in public good.
Jia Cheng ‘Anthony’ Shen ’28 is a Chemical and Biological Engineering major from Tainan, Taiwan and Singapore. He may be reached at anthony.shen[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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