Residential Colleges Expand Four-Year Option, Adding Space for Juniors, Seniors

Princeton’s Council of College Heads announced that beginning in the fall of 2022, all residential colleges will reserve rooms for juniors and seniors who want to continue living in their colleges. The move expands the existing four-year college system, which began in 2007 and included three colleges: Butler, Mathey, and Whitman.

The new arrangement will reinforce a “commitment to creating continuous living-learning communities for all undergraduates,” the college heads wrote in a Jan. 24 announcement. Students in what had been two-year colleges who choose to live in a residential college after sophomore year will no longer have to switch affiliation. Currently, 442 juniors and seniors live in the residential colleges, including residential-college advisers, according to University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss.

The 2022–23 academic year will see additional changes to the residential-college landscape, with the opening of New College East and New College West, south of Poe Field. New College East, led by faculty head Asif Ghazanfar, will include incoming freshmen as well as sophomores drawn from Rockefeller, Forbes, and Butler colleges. New College West will house students affiliated with First College (formerly Wilson), which will be razed and rebuilt as Hobson College, expected to open in 2026.