Columbia University, legally known as Columbia University in the City of New York, and incorporated under the name Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, is an Ivy League university located in New York City. It is the oldest institution of higher education in the state of New York and the sixth-oldest in the United States. Founded as King's College in 1754 under a royal charter granted by England's King George II, Columbia has grown over time to comprise 20 schools and affiliated institutions.

Columbia is internationally recognized as one of the world's foremost and most prestigious research universities. Its undergraduate schools are Columbia College, The School of General Studies, and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, known as SEAS. Columbia College has the third lowest undergraduate acceptance rate in the United States, placing just after Harvard and Princeton (the ranking is for doctoral universities, as categorized by the Carnegie Foundation and U.S. News & World Report).

Columbia's main campus occupies six blocks, 32 acres (132,000 m²), in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and its largest satellite campus, Health Sciences, is situated some fifty blocks uptown in the island's Washington Heights. This makes Columbia not only New York City's only Ivy League school but also, by some accounts, the city's third largest landowner after the Catholic Church and the City itself, with holdings that include the fifty-story former General Electric building at 570 Lexington Avenue (not to be confused with the current GE Building in Rockefeller Center).