Photo: Jonathan71 · CC BY-SA 2.5
United States · New York, Greenwich Village
New York University
A campus without gates in Greenwich Village, with outposts in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai
- QS World Ranking 2026
- #55
- Founded
- 1831
- Students
- 60,000
- Bachelor's degree
- 4 years
- Acceptance rate
- ~9%
- Typical IB offer
- 36–40
- Language of instruction
- English
Worth knowing
NYU has no gates and no fence: its buildings are scattered around Washington Square Park and dissolve into Greenwich Village, and the park itself serves as the quad. It is also the only US university with full degree-granting campuses on three continents: New York, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.
How hard is it to get in, and why
NYU's overall admit rate was 9.1% for fall 2025 and the 2026 figure is expected to be lower; Stern, the College of Arts and Science and Nursing sit under 5%. The reassuring part: you apply to one of ten schools, and Tandon, Steinhardt, Gallatin, Liberal Studies and the Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses are noticeably more accessible. Testing remains optional in 2026–27 and there are no interviews. Internationals who can pay in full have an edge, because NYU is need-aware.
What it costs
Tuition
$69k–75k per year
2026–27 tuition and fees range from $68,576 (Arts and Science, Gallatin) to $75,326 depending on the school, with Tisch and Stern at the top; the figures are finalised in July.
Living costs
$28k–33k per year
Scholarships and financial aid
NYU is need-aware for internationals and its aid is limited: some need-based scholarships and a few merit awards, none guaranteed, and the CSS Profile is mandatory to be considered. NYU Abu Dhabi is the exception: it meets full demonstrated need for every admitted student, flights included. Admitted students must certify funds for four years of study.
How to apply
Common App: choose one NYU campus (New York, Abu Dhabi or Shanghai) and one school; Tisch and Steinhardt music require portfolios or auditions. NYU adds a single short question of up to 250 words. Test-optional through 2026–27; if you do submit, NYU accepts the SAT, ACT, three AP exams or the full IB Diploma, including predicted results. No interviews. Early Decision I closes 1 November, Early Decision II 1 January, Regular Decision 5 January; decisions by mid-December, mid-February and 1 April.
Official websiteWhat makes it special
- Tisch School of the Arts trained Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Donald Glover and, briefly, Lady Gaga; film students shoot on the streets of Manhattan with the city as their set.
- Stern School of Business is a few subway stops from Wall Street, and its finance placement rivals Wharton's.
- The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is one of the world's leading applied mathematics departments.
- Tandon School of Engineering in downtown Brooklyn is NYU's engineering and computer science home and easier to enter than the Washington Square schools.
- The global network: a semester or year in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Prague, Sydney or ten other NYU sites at the same tuition, with credits that transfer automatically.
- Bobst Library's twelve floors face the park; the colour is violet, the mascot is a bobcat, and NYU is the largest private university in the US by enrolment.
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
- 9:1
- Faculty members
- ~5 100
- Nobel laureates affiliated
- 39
NYU has about 5,100 faculty teaching close to 62,000 students, with a student–faculty ratio of roughly nine to one on the New York campus. The president heads ten undergraduate schools and fifteen graduate and professional ones, each with its own dean: the College of Arts and Science, the Stern School of Business, the Tisch School of the Arts, the Tandon School of Engineering, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Steinhardt School, the School of Law and the Grossman School of Medicine among them. Thirty-nine Nobel laureates, eight Turing Award winners and five Fields Medallists have been faculty or alumni.
The campus has no walls — it occupies buildings around Washington Square, and the city functions as the teaching laboratory. Journalism students report on New York, Stern students take positions on Wall Street, and Tisch film students shoot on the streets. NYU also runs degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai plus thirteen academic centres worldwide, and undergraduates are expected to spend at least one term abroad; a student can take the same major in three cities.
Tisch is the school with the most famous alumni list — Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Ang Lee and Lady Gaga among them — and its undergraduate film programme requires students to make films from the first year rather than studying them. The Courant Institute is the quieter counterweight: consistently ranked first in the United States for applied mathematics, and the place where Yann LeCun set up the Center for Data Science in 2012, well before data science became a standard degree.
Teachers worth knowing
2003–nowYann LeCun
Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science, Courant Institute
- Teaches
- Deep learning and computer vision · Self-supervised learning
- Experience
- At NYU since 2003; won the 2018 Turing Award and founded the NYU Center for Data Science in 2012.
Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.
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1986–nowAswath Damodaran
Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education, Professor of Finance, Stern School of Business
- Teaches
- Valuation · Corporate finance
- Experience
- At NYU Stern since 1986; publishes his entire valuation course, data and spreadsheets online for free.
A valuation is a bridge between stories and numbers. Every number in a valuation has a story, and every story ends in a number.
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1986–nowJay Rosen
Associate Professor of Journalism, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
- Teaches
- Press criticism · Public and citizen journalism
- Experience
- Teaching at NYU since 1986; chaired the journalism department from 1999 to 2005.
The view from nowhere is a bid for trust that has been failing for a long time.
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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
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