One goes to Princeton for an education only in the punitive sense. In other respects, an undergraduate education as good as Princeton offers can be had at any of dozens of state schools, although more initiative may be required in order to get it at state schools.

As preppies with well-honed networking skills indelibly impress upon freshmen from state high schools within days of their coming up to Princeton, the monetary value of a Princeton undergraduate education lies at least as much in whom you know as in what you know when you graduate.

That may be even truer of Princeton than of other schools to which it is often compared. Consider the following two indicators:

First: In 1961, Charles and Marie Robertson, heirs to the A&P grocery fortune, inspired by President Kennedy’s call to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” gave Princeton $35 million – then the largest simultaneously-disbursed sum ever given to an American university – to be used by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School to prepare graduate students for careers in government. In 2002, the Robertsons’ descendants sued Princeton on the grounds that much of that gift, which had grown in value to $900 million, had not been so used. Moreover, few Princeton graduates, including Wilson School graduates, had pursued careers in the federal civil service or foreign service, contrary to the Robertsons’ hopes. In 2017 and 2018, only 4% of Wilson School graduates went into public service (see Rebecca Han, “Wilson School grads don't go into public service because of money, job prospects,” Daily Princetonian, 10 Frebuary 2019, online here). The Robertsons' suit was settled out of court in 2008, with Princeton keeping most of the Robertsons’ money; the law offers no remedy for an ethos of disdain for low-paying public service. (See Doug White, Abusing Donor Intent: The Robertson Family's Epic Lawsuit Against Princeton University [St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 2014]; and Martin Morse Wooster, “The Robertson Foundation Case: Can Princeton Ignore A Donor’s Intent?” posted May 2, 2006, on the website of the Capital Research Center, here). One will find no comparable chapter in the history of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 54% of the graduates of which still pursued careers in government or non-profit organizations in 2017, when a long-term decline in that percentage evoked criticism, not from external donors in a law court, but from among Harvard’s studentry in the Crimson’s commencement edition (Edith M. Herwitz and Alexis J. Ross, “A School for Government?” Harvard Crimson, May 25, 2017, online here).

Second: U.S. News and World Report’s annual report of the proportion of the alumni of “best” colleges that have given to their alma mater during the past two years has consistently, since its inception in the 1980s, shown Princeton’s undergraduate college to have a higher proportion of donating alumni that any other college in North America – markedly higher than the undergraduate college of any other university and most closely approached by non-university colleges including Williams, Bowdoin, Wellesley and Amherst. In December 2018, U.S. News and World Report reported an alumni annual giving rate of 59% for Princeton’s undergraduate college; no other university’s college, including Harvard’s or Yale’s, had an alumni annual giving rate of more than 44% (Josh Moody, “10 Universities Where the Most Alumni Donate,” U.S. News and World Report, December 18, 2018, online here). This does not seem plausibly ascribed either to markedly lower incomes or to markedly lower satisfaction with their undergraduate educations among the alumni of Harvard and Yale or to markedly less effort in soliciting alumni giving by the administrations of Harvard and Yale, which have even larger endowments than Princeton’s. Perhaps it might more plausibly be ascribed to a markedly keener sense among Cantabs and Elis that, except for gifts large enough to be subjected to enforceable restrictions on their use, charity might better be bestowed on recipients other than a school with an endowment of tens of billions of dollars and median alumni income well into the six-digit range.

Since the 1930s, when it first admitted students ignorant of ancient Greek, then as now a language not widely taught at state high schools, Princeton has excelled at putting brains into the service of wealth, to their mutual monetary benefit. A student who is not wealthy maximizes the monetary value of a Princeton undergraduate education by studying something useful (e.g., economics, for decades the most-subscribed major) or at least clearly indicating intent to take a useful post-graduate degree (e.g., law, if one majors in history or one of the humanities); by making good grades; by participating in athletics; by joining an eating club, preferably a selective one, despite the additional expenditure; by being helpful and convivial but responsible; by neither spurning nor commenting unduly on the largesse of richer students, instead seeking to repay it non-monetarily by helpfulness; and by adopting or pretending to adopt the values of the socially dominant independently wealthy preppies, while adopting their attire and mannerisms only to a limited degree that conveys both receptivity to becoming their client and duly deferential awareness of not being one of them.

Adopting or pretending to adopt preppy values entails never initiating conversation about the substance of what one is studying or has studied, and contributing to any such discussion only succinctly and non-substantively and only if invited to do so by one’s betters. One may join in bemoaning the number of pages one must read or write. However, to discuss the contents of those pages in a social rather than a joint-study or informal tutoring context is distinctly bad form. If one is ostensibly invited to discuss intellectual matters in a social context, one is in fact being tempted to evince disloyalty to prepdom’s values, and should decline to succumb to that temptation without explicitly refusing the ostensible invitation. For example:

• Q: Why do you think Newton used geometry rather than his calculus of fluxions in his proofs in the Principia?
• A: Maybe he was being polite. Did the giants on whose shoulders he was standing know the calculcus?

Adopting or pretending to adopt preppy values also entails evincing quiet appreciation of the reality that some laws and rules that govern the little people do not fully apply to their betters. The U.S. ruling class is open to talent and less corrupt than most ruling classes, but a modicum of corruption is an inevitable and arguably efficient response to a variety of circumstances, including ubiquitous ideological insistence that people manifestly unequal in diverse tangible respects are equal in abstract respects. A culture of striving to love others as ourselves may once have inspired the rich to diminish social inequalities; however, ideological assertion that we are all alike and have equal “rights” does not, as a Princeton undergraduate education imparts unforgettably. In particular, it teaches that equality of opportunity is an ideological chimera that does not alter but rather ignores people’s motivation to work, take risks and make sacrifices in order to advantage their own children relative to the children of others.

To succeed socially at Princeton, one need not adopt preppy values; to pretend to adopt them suffices. A Princeton undergraduate education can be both financially value-maximizing and emotionally gratifying if undertaken as an extended reconnaissance of the camp of the enemy, that enemy being not preppies themselves but rather their moral degradation due to the failure of ideology substituting for a moral culture to inspire better use of wealth and privilege. That reconnaissance can gratifyingly be continued for decades after Princeton – through a graduate degree, through Wall Street and beyond.

If you doubt that that is possible, consider Mikhail Gorbachev. He apparently feigned adoption of Stalinist values for decades, until he rose to the very pinnacle of the Stalinist power system; only then, when it was safe and useful to do so, did he reveal his sense that socialism ought not to be pursued in ways that require egregious coercion. Admittedly, Gorbachev had the benefit of growing up under Stalin; mortal fear works wonders in enhancing self-discipline. Nevertheless, his example suggests that decades-long duplicity to almost everyone about almost everything not only is possible but can be extraordinarily fruitful. If one dare hope by such duplicity to become able to destroy what one accommodates by it, then it might even be great fun.

Blinded-reader faux-gargoyle, East Pyne Hall, facing Firestone Library.