New York University

New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian American research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private nonprofit institutions of American higher education.

NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. The university counts 36 Nobel Prize winners, three Abel Prize winners, 10 National Medal of Science recipients,  16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 30 Academy Award winners,  four Putnam Competition winners, Russ Prize, Gordon Prize, and Draper Prize winners, Turing Award winners, and Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.

NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as more than a dozen other sites across the world, with plans for further expansion. According to the Institute of International Education, NYU sends more students to study abroad than any other US college or university, and the College Board reports more online searches by international students for "NYU" than for any other university.

History
Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, declared his intention to establish "in this immense and fast-growing city ... a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously opened to all". A three-day long "literary and scientific convention" held in City Hall in 1830 and attended by over 100 delegates debated the terms of a plan for a new university. These New Yorkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based on merit, not birthright, status or social class. On April 18, 1831, an institution was established, with the support of a group of prominent New York City residents from the city's landed class of merchants, bankers, and traders. Albert Gallatin was elected as the institution's first president. On April 21, 1831, the new institution received its charter and was incorporated as the University of the City of New York by the New York State Legislature; older documents often refer to it by that name. The university has been popularly known as New York University since its beginning and was officially renamed New York University in 1896. In 1832, NYU held its first classes in rented rooms of four-story Clinton Hall, situated near City Hall. In 1835, the School of Law, NYU's first professional school, was established. Although the impetus to found a new school was partly a reaction by evangelical Presbyterians to what they perceived as the Episcopalianism of Columbia College, NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colleges at the time.



Whereas NYU had its Washington Square campus since its founding, the university purchased a campus at University Heights in the Bronx because of overcrowding on the old campus. NYU also had a desire to follow New York City's development further uptown. NYU's move to the Bronx occurred in 1894, spearheaded by the efforts of Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken. The University Heights campus was far more spacious than its predecessor was. As a result, most of the university's operations along with the undergraduate College of Arts and Science and School of Engineering were housed there. NYU's administrative operations were moved to the new campus, but the graduate schools of the university remained at Washington Square. In 1914, Washington Square College was founded as the downtown undergraduate college of NYU. In 1935, NYU opened the "Nassau College-Hofstra Memorial of New York University at Hempstead, Long Island". This extension would later become a fully independent Hofstra University.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial crisis gripped the New York City government and the troubles spread to the city's institutions, including NYU. Feeling the pressures of imminent bankruptcy, NYU President James McNaughton Hester negotiated the sale of the University Heights campus to the City University of New York, which occurred in 1973. After the sale of the Bronx campus, University College merged with Washington Square College. In the 1980s, under the leadership of President John Brademas, NYU launched a billion-dollar campaign that was spent almost entirely on updating facilities. The campaign was set to complete in 15 years, but ended up being completed in 10. In 2003 President John Sexton launched a $2.5 billion campaign for funds to be spent especially on faculty and financial aid resources.

University logo
The university logo, the upheld torch, is derived from the Statue of Liberty, signifying NYU's service to the city of New York. The torch is depicted on both the NYU seal and the more abstract NYU logo, designed in 1965 by renowned graphic designer Tom Geismar of the branding and design firm Chermayeff & Geismar. There are at least two versions of the possible origin of the university color, violet. Some believe that it may have been chosen because violets are said to have grown abundantly in Washington Square and around the buttresses of the Old University Building. Others argue that the color may have been adopted because the violet was the flower associated with Athens, the center of learning in ancient Greece.

Cultural setting
Washington Square and Greenwich Village have been hubs of cultural life in New York City since the early 19th century. Much of this culture has intersected with NYU at various points in its history. Artists of the Hudson River School, the United States' first prominent school of painters, settled around Washington Square. Samuel F.B. Morse, the first chair of Painting and Sculpture at NYU, and Daniel Huntington were early tenants of the Old University Building in the mid-19th century. (The University rented out studio space and residential apartments within the "academic" building.) Artists and intellectuals, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, have contributed to the artistic scene encompassing NYU. As a result, they had notable interaction with the cultural and academic life of the university.

In the 1870s, sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French lived and worked near the Square. By the 1920s, Washington Square Park was nationally recognized as a focal point for artistic and moral rebellion. As such, the Washington Square campus became more diverse and bustled with urban energy, contributing to academic change at NYU. Famed residents of this time include Eugene O'Neill, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast. In the 1930s, the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and the realists Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton had studios around Washington Square. In the 1960s the area became one of the centers of the beat and folk generation, when Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan settled there. This led to tension with the university, which at the time was in the midst of an aggressive facilities expansion phase. In 1975, the university opened The Grey Art Gallery at 100 Washington Square East, housing the New York University art collection and featuring museum quality exhibitions.

Campus
Most of NYU's buildings are located across a roughly 229 acre area bounded by Houston Street to the south, Broadway to the east, 14th Street to the north, and Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) to the west. The core of NYU consists of buildings that surround Washington Square Park.

With approximately 12,500 residents, NYU has the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. as of 2007, and one of the largest among private schools.

Washington Square campus
Since the late 1970s, the central part of NYU has been its Washington Square campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. The Washington Square Arch is an unofficial symbol of NYU. Until 2007, NYU had held its commencement ceremonies in Washington Square Park, but moved the ceremonies to Yankee Stadium in 2008 because of renovations to Washington Square.

In the 1990s, NYU became a "two square" university by building a second community around Union Square, in close proximity to Washington Square. NYU's Union Square community primarily consists of the priority residence halls of Carlyle Court, Palladium Residence Hall, Alumni Hall, Coral Tower, Thirteenth Street Hall, University Hall, Third North Residence Hall, and Founders Hall.

NYU operates theaters and performance facilities that are often used by the university's music conservatory and Tisch School of the Arts. External productions are also occasionally held in NYU's facilities. The largest performance accommodations at NYU are the Skirball Center for Performing Arts (850 seats) at 566 LaGuardia Place, just south of Washington Square South, and the Eisner-Lubin Auditorium (560 seats) in the Kimmel Center. Recently, the Skirball Center hosted important speeches on foreign policy by John Kerry and Al Gore as well as the recording of the third season finale of The Apprentice. The Skirball Center is the largest performing arts facility south of 42nd Street.

Bobst Library
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, built between 1967 and 1972, is the largest library at NYU and one of the largest academic libraries in the United States. Designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, the 12-story, 425000 sqft structure sits on the southern edge of Washington Square Park (at 70 Washington Square South) and is the flagship of an eight-library, 4.5 million-volume system. Bobst Library offers one Multidisciplinary Reference Center, a Research Commons, 28 miles of open-stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. The library is visited by more than 6,800 users each day, and circulates more than one million books annually.

Bobst's Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world's largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year. The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.

Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.

New facilities
Since the early 2000s, NYU has developed new facilities on and around its Washington Square Campus. The Kimmel Center for University Life was built in 2003 to serve as the primary location for the university's student services offices. The center also houses the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the Rosenthal Pavilion, the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, and the Loeb Student Center. The School of Law built Furman Hall in 2004, incorporating elements of two historic buildings into the new facade, one of which was occupied by poet Edgar Allan Poe.

In 2005, NYU announced the development of a new life science facility on Waverly Place. The facility is the first NYU science building developed since the opening of Meyer Hall in 1971. In November 2005, NYU announced plans to build a 26-floor, 190000 sqft residence hall on 12th Street. The residence hall, named "Founders Hall", accommodates approximately 700 undergraduates and contains a host of other student facilities. It is currently the tallest building in the East Village.

Polytechnic Institute
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, often referred to as Polytechnic Institute of NYU, NYU Polytechnic, or NYU-Poly, is located in Downtown Brooklyn in the MetroTech Center, the nation's largest urban university-industry science and technology park. Founded in 1854, the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model, and its laboratory instruction at the undergraduate and graduate levels led to close cooperation with the industry. It is one of the oldest private technology institutes in the United States, and has made contributions in the fields of electrical engineering, polymer chemistry, aerospace, and microwave engineering.

NYU-Poly operates several on-campus and off-campus business incubators and is known for its success in the transfer of technology from the laboratory to the marketplace according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. NYU-Poly has state-of-the-art facilities including a brand new library and new facilities for its electrical engineering, computer science and computer engineering programs. The Brooklyn campus offers programs primarily for undergraduate students but also offers opportunities for graduate students, including executive programs for students with related experience.

NYU Poly also has campuses in downtown Manhattan, Long Island, Westchester, and in international locations such as Israel, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and London.

Other campuses and facilities
The New York University School of Medicine is situated near the East River waterfront at 550 First Avenue between East 30th and East 34th Streets. The campus hosts the medical school, Tisch Hospital, and the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Other NYU Centers across the city include NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases and the Bellevue Hospital Center. NYU's Silver School of Social Work (formerly Ehrenkranz School of Social Work) manages branch campus programs in Westchester County at Manhattanville College, in Rockland County at St. Thomas Aquinas College, and on Staten Island at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island. In Sterling Forest, near Tuxedo, New York, NYU has a research facility that contains institutes, in particular the Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine. The Midtown Center at 11 West 42nd Street and the Woolworth Building in the financial district are home to NYU's continuing education programs.

NYU has two units located on the Upper East Side. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a discrete entity within New York University, independent of any other school or department of the university, is located on East 84th St, while the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, a graduate school of art history and fine arts, is located at the James B. Duke Building at 1 East 78th St.

Tisch School of the Arts, Asia was NYU's first branch campus abroad. The result of a partnership between Tisch School of the Arts and the Singapore Government, it offered Master of Fine Arts degrees in animation and digital arts, dramatic writing, film and international media producing. The campus opened in fall 2007 with the intention to enroll approximately 250 students. Anticipated enrolment figures were not achieved, financial irregularities were alleged and President Pari Sara Shirazi was dismissed from her post by NYU in November 2011. She subsequently announced her intention to commence legal proceedings against NYU alleging wrongful termination and defamation. In a letter to the Tisch Asia community dated 8 November 2012, Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell announced that the campus would close after 2014 with recruitment and admission of new students suspended with immediate effect.

In the Fall of 2010, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) opened as the University's first overseas "Portal Campus" with an inaugural class of 150 students. Unlike the University's other study abroad centers, NYUAD functions as a separate liberal arts college within a University, offering complete degree programs to students admitted directly to NYUAD. NYUAD recruits students from all over the world and describes itself as the "World's Honor College". The main campus for NYUAD is under construction on Saadiyat Island and is scheduled to open in 2014. Until then the school operates from a campus located in downtown Abu Dhabi. The campus construction and operational costs are entirely funded by the Abu Dhabi government.

It was announced in 2011 that NYU planned to open another portal campus, New York University Shanghai, for the fall semester of 2013. It was set to have about 3,000 undergraduate students, the majority of whom would be Chinese. It was approved by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in January 2011. NYU's local partner will be East China Normal University (ECNU). ECNU's president Yu Lizhong will be the chancellor and play a major role in government relations while Jeffrey S. Lehman, former president of Cornell amongst other positions, will serve as vice chancellor and have "free rein in academic affairs".

NYU has a host of foreign facilities used for study abroad programs, referred to as Global Academic Centers. As of 2012, NYU operates 14 academic sites – both degree-granting research university campuses and study abroad sites – in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, including undergraduate academic-year and summer study abroad programs in New York, Florence, London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Accra, Madrid, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, Sydney and Washington DC. One of the most noteworthy is the 57 acre campus of NYU Florence Villa LaPietra in Italy, bequeathed by the late Sir Harold Acton to NYU in 1994.

NYU also has international houses on campus, including the Deutsches Haus, La Maison Française, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Glucksman Ireland House, the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, the Hagop Kevorkian Center, an Africa House and a China House.

NYU was the founding member of the League of World Universities, an international organization consisting of rectors and presidents from urban universities across six continents. The league and its 47 representatives gather every two years to discuss global issues in education. L. Jay Oliva formed the organization in 1991 just after he was inaugurated president of New York University.

Sustainability
New York University has made the greening of its campus a large priority. For example, NYU has been the largest university purchaser of wind energy in the U.S. since 2009. With this switch to renewable power, NYU is achieving benefits equivalent to removing 12,000 cars from the road or planting 72,000 trees. In May 2008, the NYU Sustainability Task Force awarded $150,000 in grants to 23 projects that would focus research and efforts toward energy, food, landscape, outreach, procurement, transportation and waste. These projects include a student-led bike-sharing program modeled after Paris' Velib program with 30 bikes free to students, staff, and faculty. NYU received a grade of "B" on the College Sustainability Report Card 2010 from the Sustainable Endowments Institute.

NYU purchased 118 million kilowatt-hours of wind power during the 2006–2007 academic year – the largest purchase of wind power by any university in the country and any institution in New York City. For 2007, the university expanded its purchase of wind power to 132 million kilowatt-hours.

The EPA ranked NYU as one of the greenest colleges in the country in its annual College & University Green Power Challenge.

Residence halls


With approximately 12,500 residents, NYU has the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. as of 2007, and one of the largest among private schools. NYU's undergraduate housing system consists of 21 buildings. Uniquely, many of NYU's residence halls are converted apartment complexes or old hotels. In general, NYU residence halls receive favorable ratings, and some are opulent. Many rooms are spacious and contain amenities considered rare for individual college residence hall rooms, such as kitchens, lavatories, living rooms and common areas. The university operates its own transit system to transport its students by bus to its campus.

Undergraduate students are guaranteed housing during their enrollment at NYU. Most freshman residence halls are located near the Washington Square area. While nearly all of the residence halls that primarily house sophomores are located near the Union Square area, two former residence halls were located in the Financial District and one is still in use in Chinatown. All of NYU's residence halls are governed by the Inter-Residence Hall Council (IRHC), an umbrella student council organization.

In 2007, the National Association of College and University Residence Halls named NYU the National School of the Year for IRHC and NRHH's strong efforts over the past year. In addition, NYU was named the National Program of the Year for UltraViolet Live, the annual inter-hall competition that raises funds for Relay For Life.

Schools and colleges
New York University comprises 18 colleges, schools, and institutes.


 * Arts & Science
 * College of Arts and Science (CAS)
 * Liberal Studies (LSP)
 * Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS)


 * College of Dentistry
 * College of Nursing
 * Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Courant)
 * Gallatin School of Individualized Study (Gallatin)
 * Institute of Fine Arts
 * Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW)
 * Leonard N. Stern School of Business (Stern)
 * New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
 * Polytechnic Institute (Poly)
 * Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (Wagner)
 * School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS)
 * School of Law (Law)
 * School of Medicine
 * Silver School of Social Work (Silver)
 * Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development (Steinhardt)
 * Tisch School of the Arts (Tisch)

Arts and Science is currently the largest academic unit of the university. It has three subdivisions, which include the College of Arts and Science, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and Liberal Studies. The College of Arts and Science (CAS) was the only school when NYU was founded.

Other undergraduate schools include the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the School of Social Work, the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (the first school of education in the United States), the Stern School of Business, and Tisch School of the Arts. In 2008, Polytechnic University merged with NYU to become the Polytechnic Institute, providing NYU with an engineering school for the first time in three decades. The university also plans to open up the Liberal Studies Program to all students for the Fall 2012 term by process of application, rather than by referral (as it has been since 1972).

Several schools at NYU also offer graduate and professional programs. NYU's postgraduate schools and divisions include the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, College of Dentistry, the College of Nursing, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Institute of Fine Arts, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the Polytechnic Institute, the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the School of Law, the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

NYU closed its School of Aeronautics in 1973, its College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1922, and has merged various programs with other schools. For example, its School of Engineering merged with the Polytechnic University of New York in 1973, and NYU's former College Hofstra Memorial became independent in 1937.

Rankings
NYU is ranked 22nd among all universities in the world by Global University Ranking (maintained by Wuhan University), and 20th nationally and 27th globally by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (formerly maintained by Shanghai Jiaotong University). NYU's schools and institutes are regularly ranked within the top 10 worldwide.

NYU's philosophy department is ranked #1 among 50 philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. NYU is also ranked #1 in finance, mathematics, Italian, and theater in the U.S. by the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, which uses data, such as faculty publications, grants, and honors and awards to rank 104 doctoral programs in 10 academic disciplines based on the research productivity of faculty members.

The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is ranked #1 in applied mathematics in the U.S., #5 in citation impact worldwide and #12 in citations worldwide. The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked NYU's math department #14 overall among top universities globally. The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is also known for its research in pure mathematical areas, such as partial differential equations, probability and differential geometry (Professors Peter Lax, S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan and Mikhail Gromov won the 2005, 2007 and 2009 Abel Prize respectively for their research in these areas) as well as applied mathematical areas, such as computational biology and computational neuroscience.

NYU's Stern School of Business undergraduate program is ranked #5 by US News and #12 by BusinessWeek (ranked #8 in 2009). Stern's MBA program is ranked #10 in US News, #11 in The Economist, #15 in the Financial Times, #16 in BusinessWeek, and #2 by research contribution.

NYU's economics department is regularly ranked among the top 10 worldwide, including #6 in an updated Dusansky-Vernon Journal of Economic Literature study, which ranked departments in terms of the publications of their faculty in top-five rated journals. NYU was ranked #9 globally in economics/business by the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2009, one ahead of Yale University.

The School of Law is ranked #6 among law schools in the U.S. by US News and World Report (and has been ranked by the same source as high as #4 in previous years). The law school is particularly noted as the nation's top law school in tax law, international law, and jurisprudence (philosophy of law). Some of NYU's alumni have been appointed justices of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court.

NYU School of Medicine is ranked #26, and #11 for best AIDS program, by US News and World Report. The School of Medicine's alumni include four Nobel Prize recipients.

The Princeton Review ranks NYU-Poly's undergraduate electrical engineering program #12 in the nation, and its graduate electrical engineering program #13 in the nation. Forbes.com regularly ranks NYU-Poly among the top 10 in its list of “Top Colleges for Getting Rich”. In 2012, NYU-Poly was ranked #21 by graduate engineering enrollment in the United States according to the American Society for Engineering Education, and #34 on "The World's Best Engineering Schools" list by Business Insider.

In the social sciences, NYU was ranked #10 by the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2009, and #11 among Shanghai Jiao Tong University's world's top 100 universities. NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development has one of the top 15 education programs in the U.S. NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service is ranked 6th nationally by US News and World Report. In addition, several of Wagner's public affairs specializations are ranked in the top 10.

NYU's Tisch School of the Arts has produced more Academy Award winners than any other film institution in the U.S. NYU Tisch members are regularly nominated to win Oscars, Emmys, and other awards: in 2011, 15 Tisch members were nominated for Oscars, and 10 Tisch members claimed Emmys.

NYU's Creative Writing Program (GSAS) was included within The Atlantic's list of "Top Ten Graduate Programs in Creative Writing", having been selected from a pool of over 250 such programs currently active in the United States.

From 2004 to 2007, NYU was ranked by the Princeton Review as America's #1 "dream school" among high school seniors. In 2008 however, NYU slipped to 4th place in the Princeton Review poll, led only by Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, citing better financial aid among Ivy Leagues and using additional parental ratings. In 2006, NYU was named by Kaplan as one of the "New Ivies".

NYU ranks 30th on the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, which ranks the world's universities based on a composite indicator that takes into account both the volume of the Web contents (number of web pages and files) and the visibility and impact of these web publications according to the number of external inlinks (site citations) they received.

NYU ranks #1 among "Universities That Turn Research Into Revenue" according to Forbes. According to data compiled by Forbes Magazine in 2008, NYU ranks 7th among universities that have produced the largest number of living billionaires.

Admissions and enrollment
NYU has a large, diverse student population representing all 50 states and more than 130 countries. About 25–30% of NYU's incoming freshmen are from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, while the remaining 70–75% are from outside the Tri-State area. 10% of the students are from one of New York City's five boroughs. NYU's main feeder schools reflect a heavy Northeastern U.S. presence, and particularly a strong New York City influence. Among NYU's top feeder schools are prestigious high schools including Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, Bronx High School of Science, and several top private schools in the northeast.

Out of the 42,242 applicants for the undergraduate class of 2015, around 30% were offered admission (when including admission statistics for the Liberal Studies Program). Out of the acceptances, 38% consisted of early decision applicants, who together form 23% of the undergraduate class. 4,650 freshmen joined NYU in Fall 2011. In 2008, NYU achieved a record low admission rate of 24% of applicants.

The middle 50% of SAT scores for the class of 2015 was 630–730 for critical reading, 650–750 for math, and 660–750 for writing. The middle 50% of ACT scores for the class of 2015 was between 29 and 31. The average GPA corresponds with an A-range letter grade, and most incoming students were in the top 10% of their class.

On June 21, 2010, NYU announced the profile of the first freshman class of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which calls itself the "World's Honors College". The class includes 150 students, 36% of whom are from the United States. The average SAT score was 1470 and the acceptance rate was 2.1%.

In a quest to find talented individuals from around the world and become a truly global university, New York University signed an agreement to accept high-performing students from the University of the People who are eligible to apply to New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. The Abu Dhabi campus is able to grant generous financial aid, enabling those students who are eligible, albeit disadvantaged financially, to attend the highly selective NYU Abu Dhabi campus.

During the admissions process, some institutions at NYU are relatively more selective than others in certain categories, depending on the institution's educational goals. For example, NYU's Abu Dhabi program focuses more than other schools at NYU on students who have demonstrated a history of leadership, whereas NYU's Tisch School of the Arts focuses more on artistic and creative traits than do other schools at NYU.

NYU is among the top 15 universities in the U.S. in the number of National Merit Scholars in the first-year undergraduate student body.

Budget and fundraising
New York University has successfully completed a seven-year, $2.5 billion campaign, surpassing expectations by raising more than $3 billion over the seven-year period. Started in 2001, this campaign was the university's largest in its history, in which they planned to "raise $1 million per day for scholarships and financial aid, faculty building, new academic initiatives, and enhancing NYU's physical facilities". The campaign included a $50 million gift from the Tisch family (after which one building and the art school are named) and a $60 million gift from six trustees called "The Partners Fund", aimed at hiring new faculty. On October 15, 2007 the university announced that the Silver family donated $50 million to the School of Social Work, which will be renamed as a result. This is the largest donation ever to a school of social work in the United States.

The 2007–2008 academic year was the most successful fundraising year to date for NYU, with the school raising $698 million in only the first 11 months of the year, representing a 70% increase in donations from the prior year. The University also recently announced plans for NYU's Call to Action, a new initiative to ask alumni and donors to support financial aid for students at NYU.

The university has announced a 25-year strategic development plan, scheduled to coincide with its bicentennial in 2031. Included in the "NYU 200" plans are increasing resident and academic space, hiring additional exemplary faculty, and involving the New York City community in a transparent planning process. Additionally, NYU hopes to make their buildings more environmentally friendly, which will be facilitated by an evaluation of all campus spaces. As a part of this plan, NYU purchased 118 million kilowatt-hours of wind power during the 2006–2007 academic year – the largest purchase of wind power by any university in the country and any institution in New York City. For 2007, the university expanded its purchase of wind power to 132 million kilowatt-hours. As a result, the EPA ranked NYU as one of the greenest colleges in the country in its annual College & University Green Power Challenge.

Student government
The Student Senators Council is the governing student body at NYU. The SSC has been involved in controversial debates on campus, including a campuswide ban on the sale of Coca-Cola products in 2005, and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee unionization in 2001 and subsequent strike in 2005. This ban was lifted by the University Senate on February 5, 2009.

Student organizations
NYU has over 450 student clubs and organizations on campus. In addition to the sports teams, fraternities, sororities, and study clubs, there are many organizations on campus that focus on entertainment, arts, and culture. These organizations include various student media clubs: for instance, the daily student newspaper the Washington Square News, the NYU Local daily blog, The Plague comedy magazine, and the literary journals Washington Square Review and The Minetta Review, as well as student-run event producers such as the NYU Program Board and the Inter-Residence Hall Council. It also operates radio station WNYU-FM 89.1 with a diverse college radio format, transmitting to the entire New York metropolitan area from the original campus, and via booster station WNYU-FM1 which fills in the signal in lower Manhattan from atop one of the Silver Towers, next to the football field at the Washington Square campus.

During the University Heights era, an apparent rift evolved with some organizations distancing themselves from students from the downtown schools. The exclusive Philomathean Society operated from 1832 to 1888 (formally giving way in 1907 and reconstituted into the Andiron Club). Included among the Andiron's regulations was "Rule No.11: Have no relations save the most casual and informal kind with the downtown schools". The Eucleian Society, rival to the Philomathean Society, was founded in 1832. The Knights of the Lamp was a social organization founded in 1914 at the School of Commerce. This organization met every full moon and had a glowworm as its mascot. The Red Dragon Society, founded in 1898, is thought to be the most selective society at NYU. In addition, NYU's first yearbook was formed by fraternities and "secret societies" at the university.

New York University has traditions which have persisted across campuses. Since the beginning of the 20th century initiation ceremonies have welcomed incoming NYU freshmen. At the Bronx University Heights Campus, seniors used to grab unsuspecting freshmen, take them to a horse-watering trough, and then dunk them head-first into what was known colloquially as "the Fountain of Knowledge". This underground initiation took place until the 1970s. Today freshmen take part in university-sponsored activities during what is called "Welcome Week". In addition, throughout the year the university traditionally holds Apple Fest (an apple-themed country fest that began at the University Heights campus), the Violet Ball (a dance in the atrium of Bobst Library), Strawberry Fest (featuring New York City's longest Strawberry Shortcake), and the semi-annual midnight breakfast where Student Affairs administrators serve free breakfast to students before finals.

Greek life
Some of the first fraternities in the country were formed at NYU. Greek life first formed on the NYU campus in 1837 when Psi Upsilon chartered its Delta Chapter. The first fraternities at NYU were social ones. With their athletic, professional, intellectual, and service activities, later groups sought to attract students who also formed other groups. Since then, Greek letter organizations have proliferated to include 25 social fraternities and sororities. Approximately 7% of NYU students choose to join fraternities or sororities.

Four governing boards oversee Greek life at the university. The Interfraternity Council (IFC) has jurisdiction over all twelve recognized fraternities on campus. Eight sororities are under the jurisdiction of the Panhellenic Council (PhC), which features six national sororities (ΔΦΈ, ΑΈΦ, ΆΣΤ, ΠΒΦ, KKΓ and ZTA) and two local sororities (ΆΦΖ and ΘΦΒ). Five multicultural organizations maintain membership in the Multicultural Greek Council (MGC), including two fraternities and three sororities. All three of the aforementioned boards are managed under the auspices of the Inter-Greek Council.

Greek organizations have historical significance at NYU. Delta Phi Epsilon, Zeta Psi, Alpha Epsilon Pi, Tau Delta Phi, Alpha Kappa Psi and Delta Sigma Pi were founded at NYU. Zeta Psi Fraternity of North America was chartered in 1847, Delta Sigma Pi in 1907, and Alpha Epsilon Pi in 1913. Delta Phi Epsilon was founded in 1917. The NYU Gamma chapter of Delta Phi, founded in 1841, is the longest continuously active fraternity chapter in the world, having never gone inactive since its establishment. Delta Phi is also the oldest continuously active fraternity in the United States, being the only organization in the original Union Triad to remain active since its institute. The NYU Gamma chapter of Zeta Beta Tau is the oldest active ZBT chapter in the country.

Athletics
NYU's sports teams are referred to as the NYU Violets, the colors being the trademarked hue "NYU Violet", and white. Since 1981, the school mascot has been a bobcat, whose origin can be traced back to the abbreviation then being used by the Bobst Library computerized catalog — short: Bobcat. NYU's sports teams include men's and women's varsity basketball, cross country, fencing, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling. All of NYU's sports teams participate in the NCAA's Division III and the University Athletic Association, with the exceptions of Men's Volleyball, which competes in the Division I Eastern Collegiate Volleyball Association, and fencing, which also participates in Division I. The National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association (NIWFA) was founded by NYU freshmen Julia Jones and Dorothy Hafner.

While NYU has had All-American football players, the school has not had a varsity football team since 1952. Notable football players include Hall of Fame Ken Strong (1956) and Ed Smith (1934), the model for the Heisman Trophy. In the 1940 season, before a football game between NYU and Missouri, students protested against the "gentlemen's agreement" to exclude black athletes (at Missouri's request). The protest against this practice is the first time such protests were recorded to have occurred.

NYU, within its brief history in NCAA Division III, has won two national team championships and many league championships. In 1997, the Women's Basketball team, led by head coach Janice Quinn, won a national championship over the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and in 2007 returned to the Final Four. NYU Men's Basketball and head coach Joe Nesci appeared in the Division III National Championship game in 1994. In 2006, the Men's Cross Country team finished 2nd at the NCAA Championship. The following year, behind the emotional support of Dan Schwartzman, the Men's Cross Country team won the 2007 NCAA National Cross Country Championship at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.

NYU Men's and Women's Swimming teams captured consecutive (2004–2005) Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Division III Swimming and Diving Championships. Christian Majdick of the Men's Track and Field team captured the NCAA Division III championship for the triple jump in 2003. Lauren Henkel, a track and field athlete and the current assistant coach of the Women's Track and Field team, acquired All-American status three times for High Jump. The Men's Soccer team won its league ECAC championship in the 2005–2006 season.

The Men's Ice Hockey team participates in the ACHA (DII) and is in the SECHL. During the 2003–2004 season, the Ice Hockey team finished second (2nd) in the nation, losing to Oakland University of Michigan.

NYU students also compete in club and intramural sports, including badminton, baseball, basketball, crew, equestrianism, ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby football, softball, squash, martial arts, tennis, triathlon, and ultimate. The Coles Sports and Recreation Center serves as the home base of several of NYU's intercollegiate athletic teams. Many of NYU's varsity teams play their games at various facilities and fields throughout Manhattan because of the scarcity of space for playing fields near campus. In 2002, NYU opened the Palladium Athletic Facility as the second on-campus recreational facility. In the same year, NYU's intramural dance team won the National Championship title at the National Dance Alliance (NDA) Division III competition in Daytona, Florida.

Faculty and alumni
As the largest private non-profit university in the country, NYU has one of the largest alumni bodies in the world. At the end of 2004, NYU had about 350,000 alumni. Of these, at least 17,000 live abroad. The New York University Office for Alumni Affairs oversees various activities such as class reunions, local NYU Club gatherings, NYU alumni travel, and Career Services. The Alumni club on campus is the Torch Club, located in Greenwich Village. In addition, the Princeton Club of New York (PCNY) has also invited New York University alumni for club membership.

NYU counts 36 Nobel Prize winners by affiliation. Notable graduating classes include 1941, which graduated three later Nobel Prize laureates (Julius Axelrod, Gertrude B. Elion and Clifford Shull), Olympic Gold Medalist John Woodruff, sportscaster Howard Cosell and sociologist Morris Janowitz; 1957 included Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt and president of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Josef Singer (NYU-Poly); 1970 included Thomas S. Popkewitz, professor of curriculum theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; 1974 included author Warren Farrell, Ph.D.; and 1977 included: former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan; IRS Commissioner Mark Everson; INSEAD Dean Gabriel Hawawini; Pulitzer, Oscar and Tony Award winner John Patrick Shanley; NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman; physicist Lewis E. Little; NASDAQ CEO Robert Greifeld; Ma Ying-jeou president of Republic of China (Taiwan); Guillermo Endara president of Republic of Panama, Clive Davis music industry executive, and Cathy Minehan, Federal Reserve Chairman Boston. Many Fortune 500 companies are currently being headed by NYU-Poly alumni, including Yahoo!, Lockheed Martin, Xerox, and AECOM.

In film and literature
NYU is often portrayed in a variety of television shows, motion pictures, literature, and other media. Fictional NYU students and faculty include Kramer's intern Darren in Seinfeld, who helps him run "Kramerica Industries"; a student reporter in a different episode of Seinfeld who interviews Jerry; Theo Huxtable (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) from The Cosby Show, who graduates from NYU in the series finale; Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) from Friends, who becomes an NYU professor in Season 6; Character Tom Collins from Rent, who taught there; Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) in the movie Wall Street (1987); Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) from the American Pie films; Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs) in Loser (2000); Alex Foreman (Scarlett Johansson) in In Good Company (2005); Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) in The Family Man (2000); Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) in The Freshman (1990); Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci) in the film version of Thumbsucker (2005), who secretly applies and is accepted to NYU; the songwriter Albert Peterson in the musical Bye Bye Birdie who promises his sweetheart Rosie to start studying at NYU and become an English teacher; and the characters Blair Waldorf, Dan Humphrey, Vanessa Abrams and Georgina Sparks in Gossip Girl.

In addition, the campus of NYU has been the backdrop for various pieces of fiction: Grace Adler's office in Will & Grace is portrayed in the show as being in the Puck Building, home to NYU's Wagner School; Henry James' novel Washington Square is set around the NYU area; and Rose of Washington Square (1939), 13 Washington Square (1928), Annie Hall (1977), When Harry Met Sally (1989), I Am Legend (2007), August Rush (2007), Remember Me (2010), Step Up 3-D (2010) and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) are centered around the NYU campus. In Ralph Bakshi's animated feature Fritz The Cat (1972), the dormitory that Fritz burns down is clearly supposed to be NYU's Weinstein Hall, located at 5-11 University Place near the northeast corner of Washington Square Park. The Warner Brothers show Felicity was set at the "University of New York", clearly modeled after NYU; and NYU's old University Heights Campus in the Bronx provided the scenery for Sophie's Choice (1982), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Maid in Manhattan (2002), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and Step Up 3D (2010). NYU is also featured in the TV show Californication.