Photo: Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA · CC BY 2.0
United States · New York, Manhattan
Columbia University
Ivy League rigour and the Core Curriculum, ten minutes from Midtown Manhattan
- QS World Ranking 2026
- #38
- Founded
- 1754
- Students
- 36,000
- Bachelor's degree
- 4 years
- Acceptance rate
- 4.2%
- Typical IB offer
- 41–44
- Language of instruction
- English
Worth knowing
The Pulitzer Prizes, the top awards in American journalism and letters, are administered and announced at Columbia every spring. Barack Obama graduated from Columbia College in 1983 with a degree in political science, and Alexander Hamilton studied here when the place was still called King's College.
How hard is it to get in, and why
Columbia admitted 4.2% of 61,031 applicants for the Class of 2030, and international candidates who ask for financial aid are reviewed need-aware, so the bar is higher still. Because of the Core Curriculum, readers look for genuine breadth: a lopsided profile with weak humanities is a liability. Testing is optional for the 2026–27 cycle but becomes compulsory from 2027–28, so anyone now in Year 11 will need an SAT or ACT.
What it costs
Tuition
$73k–77k per year
Tuition is $72,800 for 2026–27; mandatory fees add roughly $3,900. The same rate applies to Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, and the total cost of attendance is just under $100,000.
Living costs
$24k–28k per year
Scholarships and financial aid
Columbia is need-aware for international applicants: the committee sees how much aid you request, and it can count against you. In return, every admitted student's full demonstrated need is met with grants rather than loans, and families earning under $150,000 pay no tuition. You must apply for aid together with the admission application; internationals who skip it cannot apply in later years.
How to apply
Apply through the Common App, Coalition or QuestBridge to either Columbia College or Columbia Engineering. On top of the main essay, Columbia asks for a set of short answers, including a list of what you have read and watched recently and a short piece on why Columbia. Two teacher references and a counsellor report are required; there are no interviews. SAT/ACT scores are optional in 2026–27 and required from the 2027–28 cycle. Early Decision closes on 1 November, Regular Decision on 1 January; decisions arrive in mid-December and late March.
Official websiteWhat makes it special
- The Core Curriculum: every Columbia College student, whatever the major, reads the same canon, from Homer and Plato to Virginia Woolf, in seminars of about 22 people.
- A walled campus in Morningside Heights designed by McKim, Mead & White in the 1890s: the steps of Low Library are the social centre, and the 1 train reaches Times Square in 20 minutes.
- In 1939 physicists in Pupin Hall ran some of the first nuclear fission experiments in the US; the work grew into the Manhattan Project, which took its name from the borough. More than 100 Nobel laureates have studied or taught here.
- The Graduate School of Journalism is postgraduate only, but its Pulitzer Hall, the Columbia Daily Spectator and WKCR radio give undergraduates a real newsroom culture.
- Traditions: the Varsity Show, a student musical staged every year since 1894; Orgo Night, when the marching band storms Butler Library the night before the organic chemistry exam; the Tree Lighting on College Walk.
- Barnard College, a women's liberal arts college across Broadway, is formally affiliated: classes, clubs and dining are shared.
About studying in United States
Four-year degrees and holistic admissions: universities read essays, recommendations and a record of what you have built or led, not only grades. Applications go through the Common App by early November (early rounds) or early January; most top universities have brought back SAT or ACT scores. Sticker prices are the highest in the world, but Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton and a few others admit international students without looking at family income and then cover the full demonstrated need.
Teaching staff
Who runs the university, who teaches, and how lessons actually work.
- Student–faculty ratio
- 6:1
- Full-time faculty
- ~4 400
- Core seminar cap
- 22
Columbia employs about 4,400 full-time faculty across twenty schools and keeps roughly six undergraduates per member of teaching staff. Eight Nobel laureates currently hold appointments, and more than eighty prize winners have been alumni or long-serving faculty over the university's history. The president oversees a structure in which each school has its own dean: Columbia College and the School of Engineering handle almost all undergraduate teaching, alongside Law, Business, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Journalism, the School of International and Public Affairs, Architecture, Social Work and the rest.
Teaching splits into two very different modes. Large science and economics lecture courses break into recitation sections led by graduate students, while the Core Curriculum runs entirely as seminars capped at about twenty-two students, taught by faculty and postdoctoral fellows rather than delegated to assistants. Undergraduates are assigned an adviser in the Center for Student Advising on arrival and a departmental adviser once they declare a major. Research placements run through programmes such as the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and grading in the Core rests on written argument rather than examinations.
The Core Curriculum, founded in 1919 out of a wartime course on war issues, is what makes Columbia Columbia. Every first-year student reads Homer to Woolf in Literature Humanities and spends the second year on political philosophy in Contemporary Civilization, with Art Humanities, Music Humanities and Frontiers of Science filling out the requirement. Frontiers of Science, added to the Core in 2005, puts working scientists in front of every first-year student in turn. The list is revised but rarely shortened: Jane Austen entered in 1985, Toni Morrison in 2015.
Teachers worth knowing
1996–nowBrian Greene
Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics
- Teaches
- String theory and cosmology · General relativity
- Experience
- At Columbia since 1996; co-discovered mirror symmetry and spatial topology change in string theory.
Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.
More
1982–nowMartin Chalfie
University Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
- Teaches
- Molecular and cell biology · Neurobiology of touch
- Experience
- On the Columbia faculty since 1982; shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for green fluorescent protein.
I was the only one in my class who did not get an experiment to work, and I concluded I was no good at research. I was wrong.
More
2001–nowJoseph E. Stiglitz
University Professor, Business School, Economics and School of International and Public Affairs
- Teaches
- Economics of information · Public policy and inequality
- Experience
- At Columbia since 2001, University Professor since 2003; previously chief economist of the World Bank.
The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.
More
The campus in photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.
People who studied or taught here
- Joseph Stiglitz
Economist, Nobel Prize in Economics 2001 for work on asymmetric information
Professor · 2001–2026
Robert MundellEconomist, Nobel Prize in Economics 1999, intellectual father of the euro
Professor · 1974–2021
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