Cornell University

Cornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded it in 1865, and it opened in 1868. It was coeducational and nonsectarian from its early years. Cornell is also New York State's land-grant institution. Four of its colleges are statutory colleges, run under contract with the State University of New York, which gives the university a mixed private and public structure.

The Ithaca campus holds the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the College of Human Ecology, the SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell Law School, the Brooks School of Public Policy and the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Weill Cornell Medicine operates in Manhattan, and Cornell Tech opened on Roosevelt Island in 2017. Research centers include the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Cornell Center for Materials Research.

Cornell enrolls about 26,000 students, and more than a third of them are graduate and professional students. International students make up roughly a quarter of the graduate population. More than 60 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university. Its alumni include Toni Morrison, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bill Nye.

Research degrees run through a university-wide Graduate School organized into fields rather than departments. Each doctoral student chooses a special committee of faculty advisers, who may come from several departments. Professional programs include the MBA, the JD, the MPA, the MEng and the Cornell Tech master's degrees. Doctoral students are generally funded through fellowships and assistantships. The university runs on semesters. Ithaca is a small city set among gorges above Cayuga Lake.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Cornell University lists 221 graduate programs across 56 subjects: 106 master's programs and 102 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in biology, business & management and economics. Cornell University holds rank 13 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.