Columbia University Athletics

COLUMBIA QUICK FACTS
School	Columbia University
Location	New York, N.Y.
Founded	1754
Enrollment	8,400 undergraduates; 19,532 postgraduates
President	Lee C. Bollinger
School Type	Private
Admissions Rate	6 percent (2nd most selective  academic school in America)
Endowment	$9.639 billion (fall, 2015)
Student:Faculty  Ratio	6 to 1
Academic Staff	3,806
Tuition	$53,000 (as of 2015-16)
Calendar Year	Semester
Undergraduates	8,400
Graduate  Students	19,532
Total Students	27,942
Campus Size	36 acres
Undergraduate  Alumni	60,000-plus
Total University  Alumni	320,000 in 190 countries
Athletic Conference	Ivy League
Athletic Affiliation	NCAA Division I, only NCAA Division I school in Manhattan
Colors	Columbia Blue & White
Mascot	Lions

PHOTO GALLERY

Founded in 1754 and the fifth oldest institution of higher learning in America, Columbia University in the City of New York encompasses more than a dozen graduate and professional schools and the over 6,000 undergraduates studying in Columbia College and The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. The renowned Core Curriculum unites all Columbia undergraduates by providing a common foundation in literature, philosophy, science, art, history and music, and caps classes at 22 students to afford close interaction with Columbia's renowned faculty. Columbia Engineering is one of the oldest engineering schools in the U.S., developing future engineering leaders through its unique educational approach which includes a first-year hands-on design course; close student-to-faculty interaction with extensive undergraduate research opportunities starting as early as the first year; a broad-based core curriculum, liberal arts minors and interdisciplinary courses; programs and projects that foster entrepreneurship and socially-responsible innovation; and trailblazing internship and civic engagement programs in New York City and around the world. Students choose among over 100 majors and concentrations and thousands of research, internship and job opportunities.

Located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Columbia not only offers access to all of New York City, the ultimate classroom, but also guaranteed four-year housing within a traditional campus surrounded by a residential neighborhood lined with bookstores, cafes and parks. Called "the quintessential great urban university," Columbia is diverse in every way: students come from 50 states and over 90 foreign countries; over half of undergraduates are students of color, and over 500 student organizations are offered, including 31 NCAA Division I Ivy League athletic teams and dozens of community service organizations, performance groups, political clubs and publications.

As the birthplace of FM radio, the fields of genetics and anthropology, the nation's oldest literary magazine and first Black student advocacy group on a multi-racial campus, Columbia has carried on a tradition of both social and scientific innovation for over 250 years. Notable Columbians include Barack Obama, Isaac Asimov, Madeline Albright, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Julia Stiles, and many more spanning every professional field.

Columbia maintains an intimate college campus within one of the world’s most vibrant cities.  The seminar-style Core Curriculum attracts intensely free-minded scholars and connects all undergraduates. Science and engineering students pursue cutting-edge research in world-class laboratories with faculty members at the forefront of scientific discovery. Classroom discussions are only the beginning of your education. Ideas spill out from the classrooms, electrifying the campus and Morningside Heights. Friendships formed in the residence halls solidify during a game of frisbee on the South Lawn or over bagels on the steps of Low Library. From your first day on campus, you will be part of our diverse community.

Columbia offers extensive need-based financial aid and meets the full need of every student admitted as a first-year with grants instead of loans. Parents with calculated incomes below $60,000 and with typical assets are not expected to contribute any income or assets to tuition, room, board and mandatory fees and families with calculated incomes between $60,000 and $100,000 and with typical assets have a significantly reduced contribution. To support students pursuing study abroad, research, internships and community service opportunities, Columbia offers the opportunity to apply for additional funding and exemptions from academic year and summer work expectations. A commitment to diversity of every kind is a longstanding Columbia hallmark. We believe cost should not be a barrier to pursuing your educational dreams.

THE UNIVERSITY

Columbia College and The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (Columbia Engineering) offer their students unique advantages; they are at the same time small, selective colleges and integral components of a major research university. Students benefit from over 250 years of rich history and distinction, easy access to the immense resources of New York City and a dynamic residential community where “Columbia Blue” is worn with pride at events ranging from Lions’ basketball games to the World Leaders Forum, from the Varsity Show to late-night study sessions in the residence halls.

The Columbia College student body is composed of approximately 4,500 students; the Columbia Engineering student body has roughly 1,500. Students come from all fifty states and over ninety countries. They represent a dazzling array of ethnic, social, economic, cultural, religious, and geographic backgrounds. The diversity of Columbia’s student body reflects the diversity of New York City, the world’s most international city.

Columbia guarantees four years of on-campus housing to all entering first-year students. Nearly all undergraduates remain in University residence halls for all four years.

Columbia students take part in extracurricular groups of all kinds: artistic (theater, music, dance, film, and visual arts), athletic (thirty-one Division I varsity sports and dozens of club and intramural sports), communications (the Columbia Daily Spectator, the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, WKCR-FM, and many others), community service (Amnesty International, Big Brother/Big Sister programs, after-hours tutoring programs, a volunteer ambulance squad, and partnerships with dozens of hospitals, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters), and preprofessional (the Charles Drew Pre-Medical Society, the National Society of Black Engineers, and more). Other groups represent students’ ethnic, religious, political, and gender identities. There are thirty fraternities and sororities. Alfred Lerner Hall houses office and meeting space for student organizations, a black box theatre, a cinema, the James H. and Christine Turk Berick Center for Student Advising, and many dining options.

COLUMBIA BY THE NUMBERS
100	Programs of Study
60	Majors in Humanities & Social Science
22	Majors in all branches of biological, natural and physical science
50-plus	Engineering majors and minors
150	Study Abroad Programs
12-plus	Arts majors and programs
400	Research opportunities reserved for Columbia engineering undergraduates
21	Libraries
80%	Undergraduate classes that have fewer than 20 students
3:1	Ratio of students to faculty in the physical sciences
82	Nobel Peace Prize winners are Columbia alumni, faculty or former faculty
1,200	U.S. Patents issued across research areas over the past 20 years
200-plus	Research institutes and centers, including a wide range of world-class laboratories
500	Clubs and organizations
60-plus	A cappella, comedy, dance, film, music, and thetre clubs and organizations
31	NCAA Division I varsity sports
40-plus	Club and intramural sports offerings
20-plus	Residence halls
12-plus	On-campus dining halls and cafes
First	Gay rights advocacy group on any college campus
First	African-American advocacy group on a multi-cultural campus
First	College literary magazine
13	Graduate and professional schools
4	Affiliate Institutions (Barnard College, Jewish Theological Seminary, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary
$1 billion	in annual research
100s	Of lab led by prize-winning faculty working with students have generated 1,000 patents
50%	Of incoming student plan to major in science or engineering, creating an active community of inquiry
82%	Admit rate to medical school, almost twice the national average
4	Undergraduate scholar programs designed to bring high ability future scientists and engineers to Columbia to support their research goals
22	Top ranked science majors from the traditional to the most cutting-edge interdisciplinary areas of study
16	Engineering majors with students and faculty conducting world-class research
400-plus	Research positions reserved exclusively for undergraduates through Columbia's Engineering Student Research Involvement Program

LOCATION

Columbia shares its Manhattan neighborhood, Morningside Heights, with a number of other notable institutions: Barnard College, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music, to name a few. Many faculty members from Columbia and the other surrounding schools make their homes in the neighborhood. Morningside Heights is an area known for bookstores, wonderfully varied restaurants, and merchants that cater to student tastes, student budgets, and student hours.

Students are encouraged to and assisted in making full use of New York’s breathtaking variety of cultural, recreational, and professional resources. Through the Columbia Arts Initiative, students can receive discounted tickets to Broadway shows, film screenings, art galleries, and a multitude of cultural events in New York City. Passport to NYC offers students free access to over thirty museums throughout the city. Columbia students can be found any day of the week exploring the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of African Art, the Museo del Barrio, or the Asia Society. They might be discovering the theatrical offerings on, off, or “off-off” Broadway (or on campus); attending the opera, ballet, or symphony at Lincoln Center; enjoying jazz in Greenwich Village or blues at the Apollo; sampling pai gwat in Chinatown; or biking or jogging in Central Park. Columbia’s Center for Career Education offers students opportunities to explore career pathways in depth; nowhere else in the world does the concentration of industries allow such a range of possibilities for internships and post-graduate employment. New York’s public transportation system puts the entire city within easy reach of Columbia students; the campus is directly served by a subway line and five bus routes.

MAJORS AND DEGREES

Columbia College grants the B.A. degree in more than eighty programs of study in the humanities, social sciences, and pure sciences, including many interdisciplinary majors. Columbia Engineering grants the B.S. degree in sixteen engineering fields. A five-year program that begins in either school allows students to receive both a B.A. from Columbia College and a B.S. from Columbia Engineering.

Joint degree programs offer selected students the opportunity to combine their undergraduate work with study in Columbia University’s schools of law and international affairs and with the Juilliard School.

ACADEMIC PROGRAMS

Columbia College is known for its Core Curriculum, a set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. The communal learning—with all students encountering the same texts and issues at the same time—and the critical dialogue experienced in small seminars are the distinctive features of the Core. Begun in 1919, the Core Curriculum is one of the founding experiments in liberal higher education in the United States, and it remains vibrant nearly a century later. One of the signature courses in the Core is Contemporary Civilization, a year-long historical survey of Western civilization’s religious, political, and moral philosophies; another is Literature Humanities, a year-long introduction to Western culture’s most seminal and meaningful literary works. A second year of humanities offers a semester each of music and art appreciation, encouraging students to experience the cultural treasures of New York City. The Global Core requirement enlarges the scope of inquiry beyond the Western focus in order to promote learning and thought about the variety of cultures and the diversity of traditions that interact in the United States and the world today. Frontiers of Science outlines the approaches that scientists take to answer compelling problems in the natural world and introduces students to scientific research methods. University Writing equips students with the ability and thoughtfulness to read and write essays in order to participate in the academic conversations that form Columbia’s intellectual community. The Core Curriculum exposes Columbia’s multicultural student body to a variety of disciplines, preparing them for the complex questions and issues of modern society.

The strength of Columbia Engineering’s education is in its uniquely broad curriculum, preparing students not only to be world-class engineers but also to be global leaders across industries who are equipped and motivated to address the most pressing global challenges. In addition to taking rigorous math and science courses typically offered at top undergraduate programs, Columbia Engineering students benefit from programming that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship, and are also required to take courses in the liberal arts alongside their College counterparts, providing them with interdisciplinary tools for real-world problem solving. This type of broad academic exposure is what alumni often cite as the foundation of their later academic and professional success. Another hallmark of the Columbia Engineering education is the Art of Engineering, where students are introduced to the field through interactive lectures, group projects, and guest speakers. A key component of the course is a semester-long, hands-on group project. Past examples of projects include mathematically modeling the U.S. elections, designing vital signs monitors, and modifying a laser pointer to transmit digital data over long distances. In addition to the technical issues discussed in the course, other key issues of importance in professional engineering such as ethics, project management, and societal impact are addressed.

OFF-CAMPUS PROGRAMS

Columbia maintains a network of global centers, developing opportunities for research, scholarship, teaching, and service across borders. With eight international locations ranging from Turkey to Chile and from Kenya to China, undergraduate options include summer Arabic language programs in Amman, Jordan or a semester-long French literature program in Paris at Columbia’s Reid Hall. Columbia also has direct enrollment agreements with many partner institutions abroad, as well as a growing number of exchange programs with universities abroad.

Columbia was the first U.S. college to offer an integrated year-abroad program with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Other programs allow students to work at the University of Kyoto in Japan or at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

Altogether, Columbia students, with the help of advisers from the Office of Global Programs, may choose from over 150 study-abroad programs on nearly every continent.

COLUMBIA GRADUATES
5	Founding Fathers
4	United States Presidents
34	Presidents and Prime Ministers
9	Supreme Court Justices
20	Living Billionaires
29	Academy Award winners
90-plus	Pulitzer Prize winners
104	Noble Laureates

ACADEMIC FACILITIES

Columbia has the fifth-largest research library system in the world, consisting of 12 million volumes and 26 million manuscripts within 3,000 collections. Included in the twenty-two libraries are the collections of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, the Starr East Asian Library, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary. All divisions are open to Columbia undergraduates. The LEED Gold–certified Northwest Corner Building houses cutting-edge labs that bring together researchers in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering, as well as a science library, lecture hall, and café. Students may also make use of an electronic music lab, a cyclotron, an oral history collection, the facilities and programs of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and oceanographic research ships.

COSTS

Tuition for the 2015–16 academic year was $53,000. Room and board for all first-year students were $12,860. With typical fees, books, and supplies, the total cost of a year at Columbia was approximately $69,084.

FINANCIAL AID

The Office of Financial Aid and Educational Financing believes that cost should not be a barrier to students pursuing their educational dreams. All first-year candidates who are U.S. citizens or have U.S. permanent resident or political refugee status are considered for admission without regard to their financial need. International students who do not fit into the above categories should be aware that their admissions process is not need-blind; their financial need is taken into account at the time of admission. Regardless of citizenship, Columbia meets the full demonstrated need of every student admitted as a first-year or transfer student. All financial aid at Columbia is based on need, in the form of grants and student work only, not loans. Parental contributions are significantly reduced for a large portion of students receiving financial aid. Prospective students should go to http://cc-seas.financialaid.columbia.edu/ for information on specific requirements and deadlines.

According to the fall of 2015 statistics, Columbia College students received 40 percent of tuition as financial aid ($91.8 million). According to the US News & World Report, 49 percent of full-time undergraduate students received need-based financial aid and the average need-based scholarship or grant award is $47,490.

STUDENTS

Columbia has one of the most diverse student bodies in America with an international flavor as 146 countries are represented. Fifty-one percent of the undergraduate student population in the fall of 2015 identified themselves as a minority, while 16 percent were international students. Of the entire student population (graduate and post-graduate), 41 percent identified themselves as a minority and 32 percent were international students.

HOUSING

On-campus housing is guaranteed for all four years as an undergraduate. Over 12 plus on-campus dining halls and cafes serve Columbia students.

STUDENT LIFE

Columbia’s vibrant campus community comes not only from the daily engagement of accomplished students but also from the extraordinary energy, talent, and cultural diversity that defines New York City. Columbia is home to many fraternities, sororities and co-educational Greek organizations. Approximately 10-15 percent of undergraduates are associated with Greek life. Nearly 25,000 Columbia students can embrace the arts through more than 140 arts organizations on campus, as well as New York’s unmatched cultural scene. On-campus, students can get involved with over 500 clubs and organizations, 60-plus a cappella, comedy, dance, film, music and theatre clubs and organizations, and over 40 clubs and intramural sports. Columbia’s NCAA Division I athletic program sponsors 31 varsity sports.

FACULTY

The student-to-faculty ratio is 6:1. Core Curriculum classes are capped at 22 students, and 80 percent of classes have 20 students or fewer. The Columbia faculty is committed to both teaching and research, and all faculty members, including the president of the University, teach undergraduates. All faculty members maintain office hours, and each student receives a faculty adviser from the department that he or she chooses as a major. Columbia has more than 2,000 international faculty, researchers, visiting scholars and scientists. The list of pioneering discoveries made by Columbia faculty includes FM radio, lasers, X-ray photography, atomic fission, global warming, and a long list of medical breakthroughs.

ADMISSIONS

With a six percent admissions rate, Columbia University ranks tied as the second most selective school in the United States. In 2015, six percent of students who applied were admitted to Columbia University (1,655 of 27,603 applicants). The admissions rate for the School of Engineering was seven percent (567 of 8,647 applicants).

ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS

The Columbia first-year class of 1,400 students is selected from a much larger pool of applicants through a holistic, committee-based review process. There are no specific course requirements for admission, but applicants must present evidence that they are prepared for college work in a variety of disciplines as required for the Columbia degree. Accordingly, the following preparation is strongly recommended: 4 years of English, including meaningful work in literature and writing; 3 (preferably 4) years of mathematics, including pre-calculus and calculus where offered; 3 (preferably 4) years of history and social studies; 3 or more years of the same foreign language; and 3 (preferably 4) years of laboratory science (including chemistry and physics where available). Modifying the preparatory program just outlined—by taking more work in some subjects and less in others—is not only acceptable but may be desirable in individual cases.

Standardized tests are required for admission, according to the following guidelines. Students must take either the SAT or the ACT. Students who take the SAT more than once are evaluated on the highest score they receive in any individual section. Applicants taking the ACT more than once are evaluated on the highest composite score they receive. The writing component of both exams is optional. For applicants applying to enter in fall of 2017 or 2018, Columbia will continue to accept the 2400-point SAT (discontinued in March 2016) or the 1600-point SAT.

While Columbia does not require SAT or ACT writing tests or SAT Subject Tests, students who have taken these exams may submit their results if they wish them to be considered. 

Students who attend a school that does not give conventional grades or who are homeschooled must take two additional SAT Subject Tests in addition to all requirements outlined above for Columbia College or Columbia Engineering.

Applicants to either Columbia College or Columbia Engineering should have the testing service report their standardized test scores directly to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions (SAT code 2116, ACT code 2717).

Transfer students may enter Columbia in the fall term only.

The College has a Visiting Students Program, which allows students to attend for one or both semesters of their sophomore, junior, or senior year.

APPLICATION AND INFORMATION

Students may apply via the Common Application or the Coalition Application. Students for whom Columbia is their definite first choice are encouraged to apply early decision. The early decision deadline is November 1, and candidates are notified by mid-December. Students admitted to Columbia under early decision are required to matriculate at Columbia and withdraw their applications to other colleges. The regular decision deadline is January 1, and candidates are notified by April 1. Admitted students must respond to Columbia’s offer of admission by May 1.

For further information, interested students should contact:

Office of Undergraduate Admissions, Columbia University, 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, MC 2807, New York, New York 10027;

Phone: 212-854-2522; Fax: 212-854-1209; E-mail: ugrad-ask@columbia.edu

Website:

http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/

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