Organizational goals that are pursued for the purpose of accommodating an organization to a social environment are termed adaptive goals. The purpose of this article is to test the thesis that university prestige may lead to the pursuit of adaptive goals. Prestige and goal data on universities in the United States from a larger study by Gross and Grambsch were utilized to study this hypothesis as it relates to the university as an organizational type. Size, income, ownership and financial dependence are used as control variables. Zero-order correlations indicate that prestige is negatively related to adaptive goals. Controlling for size, income, and university ownership does not substantially alter this pattern. The inverse relation between prestige and adaptive goals is also generally found to hold in private universities when financial dependence is controlled. The conclusion that is thus reached for universities in the United States is: the greater the prestige, the less the focus on adaptive goals.