Columbia University

From the College

In 1754 King George II granted a charter to a group of New York citizens to found King’s College, dedicated to instruction in “the Learned Languages and the Liberal Arts and Sciences.” In its early days, King’s College taught such students as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Robert Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris. After the Revolution, New York State issued the college a new charter with a more patriotic name–Columbia. In 1897 Columbia moved to a new site in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, the preeminent architects of their day, designed an open central enclave six blocks long, with a majestic domed and colonnaded library at the center. To this day, it remains one of New York’s most impressive settings.

Today, 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.

The College enrolls approximately 4,100 students; the Columbia Engineering student body is roughly 1,400. 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. Ninety-five percent of undergraduates remain in University residence halls for all four years.

Columbia students take part in extracurricular groups of all kinds: artistic (theater, musical, and dance), 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, a campus television station, 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 and the National Society of Black Engineers). Other groups represent students’ ethnic, religious, political, and gender identities. There are thirty-three fraternities and sororities. Alfred Lerner Hall houses office and meeting space for student organizations, a theater, a cinema, the Center for Student Advising, and many dining options.

Columbia shares its Morningside Heights neighborhood with a number of other famous 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. Most of the 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 and assisted in making full use of New York’s breathtaking variety of cultural, recreational, and professional resources. Through the Columbia University 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 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, the Asia Society, or any other of the city’s hundreds of museums and galleries. Any evening, 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; taking in a movie on campus or in one of New York’s 400-plus cinemas; enjoying jazz in Greenwich Village or blues at the Apollo; sampling pai gwat in Chinatown; or biking or boating in Central Park. Columbia’s internship programs offer students opportunities to explore a career possibility in depth; nowhere else in the world does the concentration of industries allow such a range of possibilities. 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.

Columbia College grants the B.A. degree in approximately ninety programs of study in the humanities, social sciences, and pure sciences, including many interdisciplinary majors. Columbia Engineering grants the B.S. degree in more than fifteen 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.

Columbia has maintained a coherent and relevant curriculum since the time of the First World War, when it introduced the renowned Core Curriculum, a program of general education that has served as a model for hundreds of colleges around the country. One of the two oldest courses in the core is Contemporary Civilization, a year-long historical survey of western civilization’s religious, political, and moral philosophies; the second 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. The Frontiers of Science course outlines the approaches that scientists take to answer interesting problems in the natural world and introduces students to scientific research methods. 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.

One hallmark that distinguishes a Columbia Engineering education from that of other prestigious engineering schools is the number of nonengineering courses that every Columbia Engineering undergraduate takes; almost a quarter of a student’s program is in the humanities and social sciences and includes components of the Core Curriculum. Alumni often cite this feature of their Columbia Engineering education as the most important reason for success in their careers. All engineering students also take a first-year design class, the country’s only hands-on, community-based learning course. Teams of students work with nonprofit organizations and community service agencies to solve real-world engineering design problems. For example, students worked at the Amsterdam Nursing Home to design a non-weight bearing walker for its residents and at Downtown Little League to design a safer dugout.

Columbia students may, with the help of an adviser, choose from 150 study-abroad programs on every continent, many of which are Columbia-specific programs.

Columbia maintains at Reid Hall, its Paris campus, several undergraduate programs. Courses at Reid Hall are quite varied, permitting students to work not only in the areas of French language, literature, and culture but also in several other fields throughout the range of the humanities and social sciences. In addition, there is a year-long program that includes course work in the French university system.

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.

Columbia has the eighth-largest research library system in North America, consisting of 9.5 million volumes and 26 million manuscripts within 3,000 collections. Included in Columbia’s twenty-five libraries are collections of particular significance, including those 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. Columbia University Information Technology has five mainframe computers used for academic research and instruction as well as clusters of microcomputers, terminals, and printers; it has remote units and terminals all over campus, including in residence halls, to guarantee accessibility. The chemistry building, Havemeyer Hall, houses modern laboratory facilities for research and undergraduate instruction. Students may also make use of outstanding facilities throughout the University, including an electronic music lab, a cyclotron, an oral history collection, the facilities and programs of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and oceanographic research ships. Construction recently began on the new Interdisciplinary Science Building, fourteen stories housing classrooms, research space, a café, and a new science library.

Tuition for the 2008–09 academic year was $37,470. Room and board for all first-year students were $9980. With typical fees, books, and supplies, the total cost of a year at Columbia was approximately $51,886.

All first-year candidates who are U.S., Canadian, or Mexican citizens or who 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 and that their applications are read in a more selective process than are other students’. Regardless of citizenship, Columbia meets the full demonstrated need of every student admitted as a first-year for all four years of study. Recently, Columbia eliminated loans for all students receiving financial aid and replaced them with University grant money. Parental contributions have also been significantly reduced for a large portion of students receiving financial aid. Financial aid deadlines are November 14 for early decision candidates and March 2 for regular decision candidates. Prospective students should go to http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/finaid/ for information on specific requirements and deadlines. All financial aid at Columbia is based on need; no aid is given in the form of academic, athletic, artistic, or other merit awards. The Office of Financial Aid and Educational Financing believes that cost should not be a barrier to students pursuing their educational dreams.

The student-to-faculty ratio is 7:1. Core curriculum classes are capped at 22 students, and over 75 percent of classes have 20 students or less. The Columbia faculty is committed to both teaching and research, and all faculty members teach undergraduates, even the president of the University. All faculty members maintain office hours, and each student receives a faculty adviser from the department that he or she chooses as a major.

Each undergraduate division has its own student council and elects representatives to the Columbia University Senate.

The Columbia first-year class of 1,341 students is selected from a much larger pool of applicants through a holistic, committee-based review process. Candidates for admission are expected to demonstrate the necessary ability and interest to do successful college work in a variety of disciplines as required for the Columbia degree. The following secondary school preparation is recommended: 4 years of English, including meaningful work in literature and writing; 3 (preferably 4) years of mathematics, including precalculus 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). The Admissions Committee recognizes that secondary schools vary in offerings and standards; consideration is given to applicants whose preparations differ from the recommended course of study but have taken advantage of what their schools offer.

Standardized tests are required for admission, according to the following guidelines. Students may take the SAT, which consists of three sections, each graded on an 800-point scale. Students who take the test more than once are evaluated on the highest score they receive in any individual section. Applicants may alternately take the ACT, which is graded on a 36-point scale. Students taking the test more than once are evaluated on the highest composite score they receive. The writing component of the ACT is mandatory for candidates for Columbia.

In addition to either the SAT or ACT, students must also take two SAT Subject Tests. For Columbia College, they may take any two tests; for The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, they must take any mathematics test and either the physics or the chemistry test.

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 The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

It is absolutely imperative that applicants have the testing service report their standardized test scores directly to either Columbia College (SAT code 2116, ACT code 2717) or The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SAT code 2111, ACT code 2719), as appropriate.

Transfer students may enter Columbia in September 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.

The postmark deadline for applications is the first business day after January 1. Candidates are notified of the Admissions Committee’s decisions on or about April 1. Admitted candidates must respond to Columbia’s offer of admission by May 1. Candidates for whom Columbia is their definite first choice may apply under the early decision plan; the deadline is November 1 for all application material, and a decision is rendered by December 15. Candidates admitted to Columbia under early decision are required to withdraw their applications to other colleges. The application fee is $70. The fee may be waived if a school official testifies that the fee would cause the candidate’s family financial hardship. The application materials are available online. For further information or for applications, interested students should contact: