Syracuse is a comprehensive, highly residential research university. The majority of enrollments are in the full-time, four-year undergraduate program that balances arts & sciences and professions. There is a high graduate coexistence with the comprehensive graduate program and a
very high level of research activity. The average freshman retention rate, an indicator of student satisfaction, is 91 percent.
Admissions Syracuse's admissions process is "more selective" according to the
Carnegie Classification. In 2018, 26% of the incoming students were
students of color; 18% were
first-generation college students; 21% were
federal Pell grant eligible (an indicator for low-income students), and 75% received some financial aid. Students came from 48 states, along with Washington, D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico. Nearly 600 international undergraduate students from 59 countries were also admitted.
Degrees The university offers undergraduate degrees in over 200
majors in the nine undergraduate schools and colleges. The university has offered multiple international study programs since 1911. SU Abroad, formerly known as the Division of International Programs Abroad (DIPA), currently offers joint programs with universities in over 40 countries. incoming students have, on average, a 3.9 GPA and SAT scores in the 1320 range and ACT scores of 30. The
School of Architecture Bachelor of Architecture program was ranked 5th nationally in both the
most Hired from and
most admired categories by the journal
Design Intelligence in its 2019–20 rankings. |alt= |alt= The
School of Information Studies offers
information management and technology courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Syracuse University. Within the School of Information Studies,
U.S. News & World Report has ranked the graduate program as the 6th best Library and Information Studies graduate school in the United States for 2022, with the graduate program in School Library Media ranked 3rd, the graduate program in Digital Librarianship ranked 4th, and the graduate Information Systems program tied at No. 5. The school was ranked No. 39 on
Poets&Quants’ list of the Best Undergraduate Business Programs in the U.S. in 2025. The
College of Law was ranked tied for 102nd nationally by
U.S. News & World Report for 2022. Syracuse University was ranked tied for 30th in "Best Colleges for Veterans" by
U.S. News & World Report for 2022.
Libraries Syracuse University's main library is the Ernest Stevenson Bird Library (Bird Library), which opened in September 1972. The Carnegie Library serves as a quiet reading room. It also includes team rooms and a computer workstation and printing room. In addition to Bird and Carnegie Library, Syracuse University hosts the King + King Architecture Library in Slocum Hall and the College of Law Library in Dineen Hall. The Special Collections Research Center, located on the sixth floor of Bird Library, held 87,760 total linear feet of rare books, printed materials, original manuscripts, photographs, artworks, audio and moving image recordings, and university records, as of June 2025. SCRC's primary sources span over 4,000 years—from the 21st century BCE to the 21st century CE—and are actively used in teaching, exhibitions and research. They represent an array of subject areas relevant to Syracuse University and the local and global communities, including Activism and Social Reform, Adult Education, Architecture and Industrial Design, Recorded Sound and Broadcasting, Photography and Photojournalism and Syracuse University History. Notable collections include the Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Marcel Breuer Papers, Grove Press Records, Ted Koppel Collection, Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Plastics Collection, Gerrit Smith Papers, and the
Leopold von Ranke library. The university is also home to the SCRC's Belfer Audio Archive, whose holdings total approximately 540,000 recordings in all formats, primarily cylinders, discs, and magnetic tapes. In July 2008, Syracuse University became the owner of the second largest collection of
78 rpm records in the United States, after the
Library of Congress, after a donation of more than 200,000 records. The donation, valued at $1 million, more than doubled the university's collection of 78 rpm records to about 400,000. Some of the voices found in the Belfer Collection include
Thomas Edison,
Amelia Earhart, and
Albert Einstein. Since 2011, the libraries has produced
Sound Beat, a daily 90-second audio interstitial program that airs on nearly 375 stations across the world. Syracuse University Libraries includes a high-density, climate-controlled offsite storage and service complex known as the Facility that houses many of its collection materials.
Syracuse University Press, established in 1943, publishes scholarly books in several academic fields, as well as book on the history and environment of New York State. The Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Sims Hall is the university's only departmental library run by a school or college, the College of Arts and Sciences. It also has a special Harriet Tubman Research Collection and an Environmental Justice and Gender collection as part of its over 15,000 acquisitions in African, African-American, Afro-Latino, and Caribbean studies.
Faculty Syracuse University has 1013 full-time instructional faculty, 96 part-time faculty, and 454
adjunct faculty. Approximately 86% of the full-time faculty have earned PhDs or professional degrees. The current faculty includes scholars such as
MacArthur Fellow Don Mitchell, Professor of Geography, who has developed studies in cultural geography;
Bruce Kingma, Associate Provost and Kauffman Professor of Entrepreneurship, a pioneer in the field of information economics and online learning;
Catherine Bertini, Professor of Practice in Public Administration, who has worked on the role of women in food distribution;
Frederick C. Beiser, Professor of Philosophy, one of leading scholars of
German idealism;
Mary Karr, the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature, who has received a
Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry;
John Caputo, the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Humanities, who founded
weak theology;
Sean O'Keefe, former chairman of
Airbus Group, Inc. and former
Secretary of the Navy; and political theorist
Elizabeth F. Cohen. ==Research==