FAQs

You may pay for the Common Application online with a credit card. If you are having trouble paying online, you may instead send a check or money order to the Princeton University Undergraduate Admission Office. Visit Contact Us for our mailing address.

Before you get to campus, you will receive more information about registering for courses. You will be assigned an academic adviser and you will meet with that faculty member during your first days here to go over your course selection.

You may request a fee waiver one of two ways:  1) Select the fee waiver option on the Common Application. Your college or school counselor must approve your fee waiver request online or submit your fee waiver form by mail or fax.  2) Select one of the following fee waiver options on the Princeton Supplement: Princeton-specific, ACT, College Board or NACAC. All lower-income students are eligible for the Princeton-specific fee waiver. Students named QuestBridge Finalists should select the QuestBridge fee waiver. If you use the Princeton-specific fee waiver, you do not need to get approval from your college counselor.

Financial aid is awarded based on need only. We use the information you supply on your financial aid application and supporting documents to determine how much support we will provide.

Please see COVID-19 Update for complete changes to the 2020-21 cycle.

We include many factors in our assessment, particularly a student’s secondary school program and record, as well as standardized test results, and teacher and counselor recommendations. All these components are taken into consideration when we evaluate a student’s high school performance. We value liveliness of mind, motivation, creativity, perseverance and independent thought. A prospective student’s intellectual curiosity and academic excellence are the most important factors in our decision.

Consistent with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Princeton’s general rule is not to disclose a student’s personal information to anyone outside the University—including government officials or law enforcement officers—without the student’s prior written consent. 

Taking college courses while you are a high school student indicates to us that you seek out academic challenges, but we do not expect students to have taken college courses before they apply. Applicants who have taken college courses are most often at high schools not offering many advanced courses such as advanced placement or International Baccalaureate.

More than 70 percent of our undergraduates are majoring in fields different from those they indicated when they applied. Our engineering students declare their majors at the end of their first year, and all other students declare their majors at the end of sophomore year. Any changes are made in consultation with your assigned faculty academic adviser.

For those who choose to submit testing, we allow applicants to use the score choice feature of the SAT and accept only the highest composite score of the ACT, but we encourage the submission of all test scores.  Note: We do not superscore between the paper test and the digital test; you can only utilize score choice if the tests are in the same format. If you are applying Regular Decision, we encourage you to complete standardized testing by the December test date if possible.  Please review our application dates and deadlines.

We review all academic work completed during and since high school, including any postsecondary college coursework, even if some of that work took place many years ago. It is possible to be a highly competitive applicant even if your past work was not your best, including during high school or your earlier college work. If this is the case for you, we strongly recommend considering more recent college coursework to build a solid transitional foundation, ideally in courses similar to those offered at Princeton. We consider whether our applicants are prepared today, not whether that was the case several years ago.