Barnard breaks the boundaries between the classroom and the outside world. As a student, you’ll translate knowledge into action by engaging in real life experiences that will illuminate and inform your studies.
About Barnard
Welcome to Barnard, a premier college passionately dedicated to educating the next generation of women leaders, innovators, and change-makers.
Our students arrive on our leafy green campus in the heart of Manhattan from nearly every state and dozens of countries and from backgrounds of all types — but all are already strong, smart, and inquisitive.
Our leadership — Barnard’s president and administration — join forces with a committed faculty and staff and our accomplished alumnae to challenge you as you define yourselves as individuals with strong voices and bold streaks. Together, we make sure that Barnard women leave here even stronger and more resolute than you were before, ready to tackle and change the world and to excel in all you do.
Since Barnard’s founding in 1889, generations of women have graduated and gone on to make history, break boundaries, and lead the way. At Barnard, we challenge you to stand out and take risks. We encourage you to be unafraid. We champion your independence as you try, fail, learn, refine, and ultimately discover how to make your mark. There has never been a better time to be part of a college whose purpose is to amplify women’s power to change the world.
Barnard in Numbers
324
Full-Time Faculty (as of Fall 2025)
61
%
of Domestic Students are Students of Color
97
%
Retention Rate: First-year students returning for sophomore year
Our Mission
Mission Statement
Barnard College aims to provide the highest-quality liberal arts education to promising and high-achieving young women, offering the unparalleled advantages of an outstanding residential college in partnership with a major research university. With a dedicated faculty of scholars distinguished in their respective fields, Barnard is a community of accessible teachers and engaged students who participate together in intellectual risk-taking and discovery. Barnard students develop the intellectual resources to take advantage of opportunities as new fields, new ideas, and new technologies emerge. They graduate prepared to lead lives that are professionally satisfying and successful, personally fulfilling, and enriched by a love of learning.
As a college for women, Barnard embraces its responsibility to address issues of gender in all of their complexity and urgency and to help students achieve the personal strength that will enable them to meet the challenges they will encounter throughout their lives. Located in the cosmopolitan environment of New York City and committed to diversity in its student body, faculty, and staff, Barnard prepares its graduates to flourish in different cultural surroundings in an increasingly interconnected world.
The Barnard community thrives on high expectations. By setting rigorous academic standards and giving students the support they need to meet those standards, Barnard enables them to discover their own capabilities. Living and learning in this unique environment, Barnard students become agile, resilient, responsible, and creative, prepared to lead and serve their society.
Boldly Barnard
Since Barnard’s founding in 1889, generations of women have graduated and gone on to make history, break boundaries, and lead the way. At Barnard, we challenge you to stand out and take risks. We encourage you to be unafraid. We champion your independence as you try, fail, learn, refine, and ultimately discover how to make your mark. There has never been a better time to be part of a college whose purpose is to amplify women’s power to change the world.
Barnard College and Columbia University have a historic relationship that’s unique in American higher education. Students share academic resources along with extracurricular activities, athletic fields, and even dining halls. At Barnard, you’ll benefit from a college experience that offers small, intimate classes in a collaborative environment dedicated to women, along with access to the vast academic resources of Columbia University, just across the street.
World-class museums. Best-kept-secret pizzerias. Broadway’s lights. Enviable internships. When you study at Barnard, everything New York City has to offer is at your fingertips.
Fearless History
The vision was bold: Create a rigorous and challenging college for women equivalent to the education offered by Columbia.
From founding faculty rights fights in 1900 to steering the college into new eras, Barnard's past presidents have spent over a century proving that women's leadership shapes institutions, not just classrooms.
Meet President Laura Rosenbury
A leading women and gender legal theorist, Laura Rosenbury was appointed Barnard College’s ninth president in 2023.
Her research and teaching focus on the law of private relationships, exploring how law and social norms interact in family law, employment discrimination law, and property law. Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and in many other journals and books.
Rosenbury was elected to the American Law Institute in 2010 and was named a fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2014. In addition, she has taught courses on negotiation, nonadversarial communication, team building, and leadership for practicing lawyers and other executives.
She received her A.B. summa cum laude in women’s studies from Harvard-Radcliffe College and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review.
College Leadership
The College’s Senior Staff is composed of senior leaders from across the institution who report directly to the President. The Senior Staff meets together with the President weekly to provide advice to the President, develop and implement college-wide initiatives and strategy, and oversee operations of the College. Each member of Senior Staff is charged with engaging their own areas to inform proposals to the Senior Staff based on subject matter and constituency expertise as well as in follow-up conversations.
The Office of the Provost serves the Barnard faculty and supports their excellence in scholarship, teaching, service, and governance. As the College’s chief academic office, the Provost and Dean of the Faculty ensures that the liberal arts education offered to Barnard undergraduates meets the highest standards of quality.
The Trustees of Barnard College are responsible for the overall governance of Barnard College, including oversight of strategic direction and large-scale programmatic initiatives, approval of the budget and stewardship of the endowment.
Bold History, Fearless Future
Barnard has boldness in its DNA. From our founding in 1889, we have been unafraid to question what it means to be educated and what the future holds for women.
Yet to meet the challenges of our current moment, we must rise beyond boldness and move fearlessly into the future.
Changes like the climate crisis, the AI revolution, and political polarization seem to have created a future in flux. But our redoubled commitment to preparing our students to be leaders and trailblazers will allow Barnard to meet and exceed these challenges.
Over the next decade, Barnard will lead into the future with five foundations for a strengthened campus community and an elevated impact.
Accreditation
Barnard College is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 3624 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. (267-284-5000) www.msche.org. The MSCHE is an institutional accrediting agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).
Accreditation is reaffirmed every eight years through a process that entails:
- a comprehensive and campus-wide self-study by the institution,
- a visit to campus by a team of faculty and administrators from peer institutions,
- the team’s written evaluation and recommendations to the Commission, and
- the Commission’s accreditation action.
Every element of the review process is based on standards of quality developed by the Commission in consultation with its accredited institutions.
Barnard's most recent self-study concluded in spring 2022.
Barnard’s Accreditation Status
Barnard’s current Statement of Accreditation is available on the MSCHE website.