Fordham University

Private · Moderately Selective · NY

Photo: Indefatigable2 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

School data & stats

TypePrivate

LocationNY · Northeast

SettingUrban

Undergrads10,512

Student:faculty14:1

Outcomes

4-yr grad rate76%

6-yr grad rate81.9%

Drop-out rate11.5%

Study abroad—

Cost

In-state tuition$65k

Out-of-state tuition$65k

Application fee—

Community

Racial diversity56.1%

Gender diversity61%

International7.6%

IdentityRoman Catholic

Overview

Fordham is New York City's Jesuit university, and that identity is not decorative — it shapes a required core curriculum and a genuine service ethic layered onto a comprehensive research university. The school operates across two markedly different campuses: gothic-quadrangle Rose Hill in the Bronx, and the vertical Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, blocks from Juilliard and the city's performing-arts institutions, with a smaller graduate and professional site in Westchester. Students effectively choose a campus culture as much as a major, though cross-registration and shared programs connect the two undergraduate colleges under one Fordham identity.

Academics

Business runs through the well-regarded Gabelli School, and the Lincoln Center location gives real weight to communications, media studies, and theater and performing arts, with students frequently cast or interning at nearby professional companies during the school year rather than only in summer. The Jesuit core requires coursework across philosophy, theology, literature, history, and the sciences regardless of major, producing a genuinely broad liberal-arts foundation underneath every degree. Class sizes lean toward seminar format rather than large lectures, and the city location lets Fordham draw working professionals from finance, media, law, and the arts into the classroom as adjuncts.

Campus & student life

Rose Hill has the feel of a traditional residential college — a leafy quad, Collegiate Gothic buildings, dorm-centered social life — while Lincoln Center students live more like young New Yorkers, dispersing into the city after class with less traditional campus-quad culture. Catholic identity and Campus Ministry, including well-attended service and immersion trips, are present without dominating daily life for non-Catholic students. Athletics compete mostly in the Atlantic 10, drawing genuine but modest attention, concentrated more at Rose Hill than at the smaller Lincoln Center campus.

Getting in

Fordham reviews holistically, reading essays closely and weighing some sense of fit with its Jesuit, service-oriented mission alongside academic record. It has built a reputation for offering substantial merit aid to compete with peer private universities carrying similarly high sticker prices, and it maintains both early action and early decision rounds for students ready to commit.

After graduation

The New York City location is the clearest outcomes driver: Gabelli and Lincoln Center students in particular routinely convert during-the-school-year internships at banks, media companies, and entertainment firms into full-time offers, a pipeline fewer suburban or rural universities can offer as directly. The alumni network is large, loyal, and heavily concentrated in the New York metro area, useful for networking well beyond graduation.

Worth knowing

Prospective students should weigh Rose Hill against Lincoln Center concretely rather than assuming "Fordham" means one experience — the two campuses genuinely differ in feel, pace, and social life. The required theology and philosophy core is worth knowing upfront for students who want a strictly secular curriculum, though in practice it rarely feels like religious instruction so much as a classic liberal-arts requirement.

fordham.edu ↗

Admissions

Acceptance rate59.3%

Enrolled mid-50%SAT 1320–1480 · ACT 30–33

Test policyoptional

Rec letters1

Deadlines (2026–27 cycle)

Early actionNov 1

Early decisionNov 1

Regular decisionJan 3

Verified from the school’s admissions page ↗

Applying