Columbia Admissions Essays

About Columbia University

Columbia is Located in New York, NY

Columbia Stats

  • 7% acceptance rate
  • 24,221 enrolled students
  • $51,008 tuition & fees
  • #4 in US News & World Report

Columbia Facts — you should know this stuff!

Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is an American private Ivy League research university located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the State of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Today the university operates Columbia Global Centers overseas in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Nairobi.

The university was founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain. After the American Revolutionary War, King's College briefly became a state entity, and was renamed Columbia College in 1784. The University now operates under a 1787 charter that places the institution under a private board of trustees, and in 1896 it was further renamed Columbia University. That same year, the university's campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its current location in Morningside Heights, where it occupies more than six city blocks, or 32 acres (0.129 km2). The university encompasses twenty schools and is affiliated with numerous institutions, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and the Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America as well as the Juilliard School.

Columbia annually administers the Pulitzer Prize. It has 98 Nobel Prize laureates as affiliations and, as of 2011, had more alumni of Nobel Prize winners than any other academic institution in the world. The university is one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities, and was the first school in the United States to grant the M.D. degree. Notable alumni of the university include nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court; 20 living billionaires; 26 Academy Award winners; and 29 heads of state, including three United States Presidents.


Essays That Worked

Read the top 3 college essays that worked at Columbia and more. Learn more.

Buy Now
Google+