About

Informally known as Columbia Institution in the City of New York, Columbia University is a private research university in the Big Apple. The fifth-oldest college in the country, Columbia University was founded as King's College at Manhattan's Trinity Church in 1754. It is the oldest university in New York and the state of New York. It is an Ivy League member and one of the nine colonial colleges established before the Declaration of Independence. The top universities in the world include Columbia.

George II of Great Britain issued a royal charter that founded Columbia. Following the American Revolution, it was renamed Columbia College, and in 1787 it was put under the control of a private board of trustees led by former pupils Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. The campus was relocated to Morningside Heights in 1896, and the name was changed to Columbia University.

The laser and maser, nuclear magnetic resonance, the first nuclear pile, the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas, the first evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift, much of the initial research and planning for the Manhattan Project during World War II, and other scientific breakthroughs have all been made possible by Columbia scientists and scholars.

Twenty schools make up Columbia, including 16 graduate schools and four undergraduate ones. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and accelerator labs with Big Tech companies like Amazon and IBM are a few examples of the university's research initiatives. In the United States, Columbia University was the first institution to award the MD degree and is a founding member of the Association of American Universities. The Pulitzer Prize is also annually administered by the university. The third-largest private research library in the United States is Columbia University Library, which has more than 15 million books.

By 2022, the university will have one of the greatest endowments of any academic institution, at $13.3 billion. In addition to the seven Founding Fathers of the United States, four U.S. presidents, 33 foreign heads of state, two secretaries general of the United Nations, ten justices of the United States Supreme Court, one of whom is currently sitting, 101 Nobel laureates, 125 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 53 active billionaires, 22 Olympians, 33 Oscar winners, and 125 Pulitzer Prize winners are among its alumni, faculty, and staff as of December 2021.