N.Y.U. Putting $1 Billion Into Its Engineering School in Brooklyn

The investment bore fruit: In 2006, the school was at number 82 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. This year, it ranked 33.

The investment in the school comes as N.Y.U.’s president, Andrew Hamilton, is planning to retire next year. “I came to N.Y.U. with several priorities, among them improving affordability, increasing diversity, enhancing the sciences, and building upon our foundation in Brooklyn,” Mr. Hamilton, a former chemistry professor at Yale, said in a statement.

“Engineering education is a force for social mobility, an economic engine for the borough, and a vital contributor to the city’s effort to be a world center of tech,” he added.

Still, an education at Tandon may be out of reach for many New Yorkers: The total sticker price to attend for on-campus N.Y.U. students, which includes Tandon, is currently more than $83,000 a year.

Lower-income students typically pay less because of financial aid — about $23,000 in the 2020-21 school year, according to federal data — but they can still expect to pay significantly more for an education at N.Y.U. than at many other higher-education institutions in the city, including public colleges and some private universities like Columbia.

The sticker price at Columbia for students to attend and live on campus is more than it is at N.Y.U., for example, but the lowest-income students at Columbia paid on average less than $10,000 a year in the 2019-20 school year after financial aid was factored in, according to the latest year of data available on the federal site, College Navigator. At other private universities in the region, such as Fordham University and The New School, lower-income students pay similar amounts on average to what they would pay at N.Y.U.

At CUNY’s College of Technology, the overall price for in-state students was close to $26,000, but, after aid, dropped to less than $2,500 for the lowest-income students.