The city’s public school system, operated by the New York City Department of Education, is the largest in the United States. About 1.1 million students are taught in over 1,200 primary and secondary schools.
The schools, which are partially publicly funded, include Harlem Success Academy and Girls Prep. There are about 900 additional private schools of various specialties in the city. Although not often thought of as a college town, there are approximately 594,000 students in New York City, the largest number of any city in the United States. In 2005, three out of five Manhattan residents had a college degree and one out of four had advanced degrees, one of the largest concentrations of the highly educated of any American city.
New York is home to several notable private universities such as Barnard College, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Fordham University, New York University, The New School, Pace University, and Yeshiva University. The public City University of New York is one of the largest universities in the country, and includes a number of undergraduate and partner colleges, with options in every neighborhood.
The city has dozens of other smaller private colleges and universities, including several religious and special-use institutions such as St. John’s University, the Juilliard School, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and the School of Visual Arts.
Much of the scientific research in the city is done in medicine and the life sciences. New York has the highest number of master’s degrees in the life sciences awarded annually in the United States. The city receives the second highest amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health of any US city. Major biomedical research institutions include Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Weill Cornell Medical College.
The New York Public Library, which has the largest collection of any public library in the country, serves Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The New York Public Library has several research libraries, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Queens is served by the Queens Public Library, which is the second largest public library in the country. The Brooklyn Public Library serves Brooklyn.
