City University of New York

The City University of New York is New York City's public university system, established in 1961 from municipal colleges whose oldest unit, the Free Academy (now City College), opened in 1847. It comprises 25 campuses: senior colleges, community colleges, and professional schools across the five boroughs. Its defining fact is a federated system rather than a single campus, with the CUNY Graduate Center as the principal doctoral institution.

Senior colleges include City College, Hunter, Brooklyn, Queens, Lehman, Baruch, and John Jay. Professional schools include Law, Public Health, Labor and Urban Studies, and Medicine. The Graduate Center in Manhattan awards most CUNY PhDs and houses institutes in the humanities and social sciences. Fields that matter for graduate students include urban policy, education, public health, criminal justice, and the sciences at City College.

CUNY enrolls about 240,000 students, including tens of thousands in graduate and professional programs. The student body is heavily first-generation and immigrant, with family origins in more than 200 countries. Several thousand full-time faculty teach across the colleges. Alumni include General Colin Powell, polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, all associated with City College.

Doctoral study is concentrated at the Graduate Center and in professional schools of law, medicine, and public health, while master's programs run on many senior campuses. Supervision follows a U.S. research-doctorate model, often with consortial faculty. The calendar is a semester year. Fellowships and tuition support at the Graduate Center are central for PhD students. Graduate life is urban and borough-based, with the Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue as the doctoral hub.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, City University of New York lists 7 graduate programs across 5 subjects: 3 master's programs and 4 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in philosophy, social work & sociology and languages & linguistics.