Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark in 1747, and then to its current campus, nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University.

The colonial colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the Thirteen Colonies before the founding of the United States of America during the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably since the survey of their origins in the 1907 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature.