Select any icon on the page for more information.

Cornell University

Ithaca, NY

School Website

How Colleges Spend Money

The graph below shows the Administrative Cost Per Student at Cornell University. This is a measure of expenditures per student for day-today executive operations of the institution, not including student services or academic management.

Visit www.HowCollegesSpendMoney.com to learn more about spending in higher education, including instructional costs, student services costs, and more.

FIRE Speech Rating

Cornell University earns a Yellow speech code rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

A yellow light institution maintains policies that could be interpreted to suppress protected speech or policies that, while clearly restricting freedom of speech, restrict relatively narrow categories of speech.

FIRE evaluates colleges and universities' "speech codes," or written free speech policies, for how well they protect students' freedom of speech. ACTA believes an institution's commitment to free expression correlates with its commitment to academic excellence, facilitated through the free exchange of ideas.

Oases of Excellence

Cornell University has an ACTA Oasis of Excellence on campus. ACTA’s Oases of Excellence initiative highlights academic centers that prepare students for informed citizenship in a free society by maintaining the highest academic standards, introducing students to the best of the foundational arts and sciences, teaching American heritage, and ensuring free inquiry into a range of intellectual viewpoints. Learn more about Oases of Excellence here.

Program on Freedom and Free Societies


According to its mission statement, "Cornell is a private, Ivy League university and the land-grant university for New York state. Cornell’s mission is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge, to educate the next generation of global citizens, and to promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community. Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of students, the people of New York and others around the world. " [Source]

Curriculum last evaluated: 11/24/2023

2021-22 enrollment and tuition data, and four-year graduation rates for first-time, full-time freshmen who enrolled in Fall 2012, are derived from the National Center for Education Statistics’ College Navigator.