While Columbia College has traditionally taken many of its students from private American prep schools like Exeter, Deerfield, and Choate and top New York City day schools like Horace Mann, Collegiate, and Dalton, most current undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the world. Today, Columbia is one of the more geographically and racially diverse of the Ivy League schools.

Columbia has formal educational ties to the Juilliard School of Music, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and to Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. It operates Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York, the Arden House Conference Center in Harriman, New York, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and Reid Hall, an academic facility in Paris. The university's library system, among the nation's largest, has many important manuscript and rare book collections.

Campus

Thanks to former university president Seth Low's late-19th century vision of a university campus where all disciplines could be taught and free discourse enjoyed by all, most of Columbia's graduate and undergraduate studies are conducted in Morningside Heights--a remarkable achievement, given the difficulty of finding contiguous real estate in Manhattan, even during the 19th century. This campus was designed by acclaimed architects McKim, Mead, and White and is considered one of their greater successes.

Organizations and athletics

There are a number of prominent student organizations at Columbia. Major publications include the Columbia Daily Spectator, the nation's second oldest student newspaper; The Fed , an alternative humor paper, the Jester (a now-dormant campus humor magazine established in 1899 and edited at one point by Allen Ginsberg); the Columbia Review, the nation's oldest college literary magazine; the Blue & White, a literary magazine established in 1892; the Collection, an undergraduate literary magazine; and the Journal of Politics & Society, the nation's leading journal of advanced undergraduate research in the social sciences. The annual Varsity Show, once led by Rodgers and Hammerstein, is a student produced musical that lampoons Columbia traditions and students, as well as rival colleges.

While Columbia is no longer an athletics powerhouse, sports at Columbia have a long and storied tradition. Crew was Columbia's first sport. The Columbia football team is one of the nation's oldest and played a major role in the development of the sport. It won the Rose Bowl in 1934. Its wrestling team is the nation's oldest. Columbia has also been home to some of the nation's finest athletes. For example, Lou Gehrig played baseball while he was a student at Columbia and Sid Luckman played football. Today, Columbia fields top teams in crew, fencing, golf, tennis, sailing. Its basketball and its football program, after storied failures in the 1980s, are experiencing an upswing. The football team set an NCAA record of most consecutive football games without a win, and after a losing streak of 44 games, it broke the streak by beating Princeton at Columbia's homecoming game in 1988.

Columbia is among the top 20 universities in terms of its number of NCAA Division I varsity sports offerings.

For a listing of organizations, see the article Clubs and Organizations of Columbia University.