With the fall 2007 opening of Whitman College, the residential college system at Princeton has been enhanced to expand housing and dining options for all undergraduates. Building on the success of its two-year colleges, the University now offers residential college housing to interested juniors and seniors. Princeton guarantees on-campus housing for students for all four years.

This expanded system offers three four-year residential colleges, Butler, Mathey and Whitman, each of which serves as home to approximately 400 freshmen and sophomores, 100 juniors and seniors and 10 graduate students. (Butler will become a four-year residential college in the fall of ’09). The system also includes Forbes, Rockefeller and Wilson, three two-year residential colleges that house approximately 475 freshmen and sophomores and 10 graduate students.

Princeton's residential campus ensures that even in a student body of 4,760 undergraduates, freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors develop a sense of home within a tightly knit community. The residential colleges offer a welcoming environment and a host of social and intellectual opportunities throughout the academic year. Juniors and seniors can take advantage of these opportunities even if they choose not to live in the residential colleges.

Students are randomly assigned to a residential college, and freshmen typically take on the identity of their college with pride early in the first semester. Each freshman has a junior or senior residential college adviser who is on hand to answer questions and help with the adjustment to college life. Each college has a faculty master, faculty fellows, dean, director of studies and a director of student life.

Freshman seminars and writing seminars often meet in residential college classrooms. In addition, residential colleges organize many out-of-class learning opportunities, such as shared meals with prominent professors, foreign-language discussion tables, film series, topical speakers and trips to the theater, opera and ballet.

Colleges also organize dances, barbecues and movie nights. They compete against each other in intramural sports such as soccer and volleyball. And most important, they give every student a home base from which to explore new and exciting opportunities.