I am attending Stern next fall and noticed that NYU is currently in the process of taking on a new president (after sexton received multiple votes of “no confidence”). Andrew Hamilton (not to be confused with Alexander) is taking role after Sexton’s long hold as president. It seems as an outsider that NYU has become a little too concerned with rapidly expanding without much regard to holding onto its academic prestige or remaining reasonable financially. Programs like LSP are incredibly expensive and take on students that previously would not have been admitted to NYU. I am concerned as a new student that saying I went to NYU will have less weight as NYU is becoming more and more willing to accept anyone (although not to their first choice school) who is willing to pay the hefty tuition for the benefit of living in NYC.
What are your thoughts on NYU’s current direction and do you think the new president will rectify some of the damage done by Sexton? How has NYU’s falling reputation as a university as a whole impacted your decision to attend?
Just tell people you went to Stern. Problem solved.
If there are any NYU students or alums here who can comment on this I would be very interested as well.
I’m just a freshman, but I suggest you look at the NYU 2031 plan and the case they make: http://www.nyu.edu/nyu2031/nyuinnyc/growth/the-case-for-space.php#current-profile
I personally have no idea what’s the cost benefit of all of this with regards to financial aid and faculty research, and I’d be very interested for someone to enlighten me regarding this. NYU projects a .5% annual growth rate in the undergrad/grad student body, which is not much I think.
NYU has done a lot in the past 15 years to attract star professors: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/magazine/ivy-envy.html?pagewanted=all
Their econ and math departments are definitely top notch in terms of research activity. Although I do wonder how faculty accessibility and undergraduate research have changed.
I don’t think this can be solved that simply. The best schools aren’t the best because they excel at just one program/field, they are the best because the university devotes resource and funding to all of its schools. Right now it seems NYU is neglecting its academic duties. I also am afraid of the devaluing of my NYU degree because NYU seems to want to accept more students who are just under-qualified. LSP is just one example and it’s a pretty obvious one at that. Another recent example would be Tandon. I can’t believe that they would propose a merger with Poly / Tandon even though many students there definitely do not have the credentials to be accepted at NYU. In doing this, they are attacking their own reputation especially their math, financial math, applied math and computer science department at Courant. It would’ve made much more sense to include building an engineering school in the 2031 plan or start an engineering program affliated with Courant from scratch. I believe they already knew this because it is much cheaper to just buy a school instead of making a new one even if it harms your own school’s reputation. NYU wanted to mitigate the damage by renaming the school to Tandon so it would be harder to associate it with the old school that accepts ~70% of their applicants. To them, it’s hitting three birds with one stone, more applicants + more space + more tuition = more money in their pockets. I didn’t realize that there would be such an easy backdoor to NYU until after I applied and it made me regret coming here. The 2031 plan is just an extension of this idea, more space, more applicants, more money.
Also there is lot of shady things that happen in the board of trustees, and it seems embezzling is one of them. Some of the buildings that are a part of NYU aren’t owned but leased and the land lord is none other than the people at one of the high administrative seats. The same could be said about our student loans because the people that run NYU are also corporate presidents or CEOs who buy and sell loans. I would consider these type of people parasites. They infected NYU and they are stealing money that should’ve been spent on academia/research and loading their own / their company’s pockets. They only way NYU can be saved is if the host dies aka NYU falls so low that the parasites have nothing more to gain. I really hope this doesn’t happen but this is the trend I’m seeing. Even though Alexander Hamilton is a chemistry professor, I feel like the corrupt board will only choose people that will benefit them, not NYU. In order to fix this, they shouldn’t fund expanding student housing and instead make NYU much more selective. They should use that resource to fund more research which benefits professors. post docs, and grad students. They should improve technology and equipment that are needed for research and lab. If they want space, they should create more labs and buildings devoted to certain research. Most importantly they should be supporting their undergraduate students because they are the students that are representing NYU. Instead of spending money on useless things like cohort cup and cohort meetings, they should be encouraging NYU students to attend nationwide competitions in their respective fields. They should create a way for NYU students to easily apply to research positions because NYU is a research university. They should make schools/majors more specific such as Cornell’s applied economics or Carnegie mellon’s school of computer science to attract the top students that are aiming towards a specific field. For example, undergraduate financial mathematics or Compurational finance would definitely by a desired major.
@dontfeelthesame I understand where you’re coming for, but I wonder to what extent student culture drives the demand for undergraduate research.
NYU does have DURF for CAS students and SURP from NYU Langone (which has a lot of medical research). I don’t know about the other colleges but there definitely are a lot of students that pursue research(http://cas.nyu.edu/page/researchjournal). At the same time, of the percentage of students attending here, how many want to do research and are able to find a spot? If only 300 out of 8,000 want to do research and all are able to find something, then that’s great but it won’t necessarily make undergraduate research a top priority. If 1,500 want to but most can’t then that’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
Of course NYU could further encourage undergraduate research but in order to do so requires an honest look at how many resources they have. Professors can only take on so many undergrads. NYU 2031 certainly adds academic buildings, but I don’t know how much is enough.
Ummm–your notion that NYU has a falling reputation is just not accurate. What are you basing this on?
And you really have to be kidding about “all the damage Sexton has done.” Really? Read up on the growth of NYU under his tenure.
This is a recent editorial regarding Sexton. It paints quite a different picture.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john-sexton-man-transformed-nyu-article-1.2470902
Now I’m not saying that I agree with all his decisions or that he hasn’t made mistakes. But most of us would be pretty damn happy to have succeeded in life like he has.
That’s a valid concern to have but NYU has a world class reputation and what the school is doing is unprecedented in academia. I’m talking about building a global network university and having students all around the world which actually increases NYU’s profile.Other top schools are actually jealous that NYU has been able to pull off something like this.
Sexton is actually the person who led NYU to such a meteoric rise. No school has risen as much as NYU has in the past 20-30 years.
According to Time Magazines world university rankings, NYU has gone from a top 60 school to top 30 in the past 5 years.
NYU is booming. This is a golden age for them.
I believe NYU is need-blind for domestic applicants. Sure they are need-aware for international students, but remember that very few schools perform need-blind admission for international students, and all of them are not as expensive as NYU. So I don’t really understand your claim that NYU is taking students who can pay rather than those who are well-qualified, because they can’t know your ability to pay while reading your profile.
Sure they are stingy with financial aids, that’s why NYU’s enrollment rate is so low. NYU tends to admit way more students than it can handle, expecting many to drop out due to the expensive price tag. But it doesn’t mean that the school is giving low-income students an unfair treatment, it simply means that the school is very expensive and not for everyone, as it always has been.
I’m an American-Asian citizen, and the last two summers, I spent a lot of time in my “root” country participating and organizing many activities there. I made a lot of connections with local high school students, many of which are not applying to US colleges. And almost every students there know about NYU. Sure they’ve heard of school like Harvard, MIT or Stanford, but the fact that they don’t know what Dartmouth, UPenn, Vanderbilt,… are yet have a deep understanding of NYU really amazed me.
I think the NYU “brand” has been very good recently. I think the school is recognized as a very good school in a unique environment. The establishment of NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, and tons of NYU’s international learning centers cement NYU’s status as a “legit” higher learning institute. So I’d have to disagree with you that the NYU name is not doing well.
I’ve heard of complaints from students about academic and living quality within NYU, and maybe that’s Sexton’s fault. But that’s another story.
NYU’s dorms and meal plans are rated very highly. Not saying it’s cheap, but not that over-priced considering the location and cost of local housing. You do have the option of low-cost housing and preparing your own meals because many of the dorms have kitchens. And of course you can find your own housing off campus.