What university did Nick Carraway attend?

Nick Carraway attended Yale University. In The Great Gatsby, Nick identifies himself as a Yale alumnus and recalls knowing Tom Buchanan during their college years. Both men were members of the same broad social world, although Tom belonged to the wealthy elite while Nick came from a prosperous Midwestern family.

Nick’s Yale background helps explain his connection to Tom, Daisy Buchanan, and the established upper class of the East Coast. It gives him access to people and places that might otherwise be closed to a newly arrived bond salesman. At the same time, Nick remains partly an outsider, observing the privilege and carelessness around him rather than fully belonging to it.

Readers sometimes confuse Nick’s university with Oxford because Jay Gatsby claims to have studied at Oxford after World War I. Oxford is associated with Gatsby, not Nick. Harvard and Princeton are also plausible-sounding distractors because they fit the world of elite American education, but the novel specifically identifies Nick as a Yale graduate.