Early application is crucial for the fullest consideration. Visit our financial aid section to see a full listing of options and to learn how to apply for financial aid.

Selected opportuntities include:

21st Century Scholarships are offered to full-time, newly admitted master's and advanced certificate applicants showing the greatest potential and who show the strongest fit with the vision and mission of NYU Steinhardt. Applicants must meet all application deadlines (admission and FAFSA) for automatic consideration. No scholarship application required.

Steinhardt Graduate Scholarships are offered to full-time master's and doctoral students who are academically talented and show a need for financial assistance. Applicants must meet all application deadlines (admission and FAFSA) for automatic consideration. No scholarship application required.

OPPORTUNITY SCHOLARSHIPS

The New York University Opportunity Fellowship is awarded on a highly competitive basis to newly admitted students from underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) who exhibit strong academic ability. Several scholarships (some with stipend awards) are offered each fall to those intending to pursue full-time study. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 (only available for the fall semester) to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions. 

The Deans Opportunity Scholarship is a competitive award for newly admitted master's and advanced certificate students from underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) who intend to pursue full-time study. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 for the fall/summer and November 1 for the spring to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions.  

The Health Professions Opportunity Scholarship is designed to assist newly admitted full-time graduate students from historically underrepresented groups (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) enrolled in any of the following health-related areas: physical or occupational therapy, community and international health, health education, nutrition, and speech pathology. A completed scholarship application, separate from the admission application and FAFSA, must be submitted by March 1 for the fall and November 1 for the spring to the Office of Graduate Admissions. Click here for the application and instructions. 

Doctoral Financial Aid

 All applicants to Ph.D. and Ed.D programs who meet the December 15 application deadline are considered for fellowships, assistantships, and scholarships.  There are no scholarship applications required.

The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University, and a consortium of universities. The partners include Columbia University, the City University of New York (CUNY), Dartmouth College, Parsons the New School for Design, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Teachers College. The G4LI will identify which qualities of computer games engage students and develop relevant, personalized teaching strategies that can be applied to the learning process. Ken Perlin, professor of computer science in NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and founding director of the Media Research Laboratory at NYU, who will co-direct the G4LI.

Microsoft Research is providing $1.5 million to the Institute. NYU and its consortium of partners are matching Microsoft's investment, for a combined $3 million. Funding covers the first three years of the G4LI's research, which will focus on evaluating computer games as potential learning tools for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the middle-school years (grades 6-8). The institute will work with a range of student populations, yet focus on underrepresented middle-school students, such as girls and minorities.

Video games, with their popularity and singular ability to engage young people, are showing promise as a way to excite and prepare the Net generation, the current crop of students who have grown up on technology. This generation, though well-versed in using technology for social networking and Internet research, is continuing a decline in proficiency and interest in math and sciences - the very skills needed to prepare them for the new demands and requirements of the 21st century.

While NYU will serve as the hub of the G4LI in its Computer Science Media Research Laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the multi-institutional organization will have a myriad of partner spokes. The G4LI also will evaluate game prototypes and introduce them, along with accompanying curricula, to an existing network of 19 New York City area schools; results in the classroom will be tracked. Based on the findings, the institute's goal is to expand its research and game development to all K-12 grades. Resulting scientific evidence will be shared broadly with researchers, game developers and educators.

Media coverage of G4LI announcement: 

The New York Times
e-Week
Popular Mechanics
Washington Square News
PC World

During the Summer of 2008, these videos were reviewed in over 30 print and online magazines. Click the links below to read reactions:

• GayWired.Com
• Time Magazine
• Queerty
• EdgeNY
• Public Health Solutions (pdf)

Watch the video

Stage will work with the University's School of Education in the area of educational assessment, evaluation and research methods to support staff in curriculum development at the graduate level and staff development in graduate supervision and student support. Stage will also provide support as the School offers leadership and guidance to policymakers as well as outreach educational activities to various stakeholders across the Caribbean region.

Stage is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. Over 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Senior Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, Professor of Religion at Temple University, Heidi Hartmann, President and CEO, Institute for Women's Policy Research, Percy R. Luney, Jr. Dean and Professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University and Emily Vargas-Barone, Founder and Executive Director of the RISE Institute.

For further information about the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, please contact FULSPEC@cies.iie.org or consult www.cies.org.

The grant blends expertise from three Steinhardt departments and from CAS. Principal investigator Jan Plass, associate professor in the Department of Administration, Leadership and Technology, will work with Steinhardt's assistant professors Bruce Homer of Applied Psychology and Catherine Milne of Teaching and Learning, along with Trace Jordan, assistant director of the core curriculum in CAS. Under the grant, the group will enhance the computer simulations used in chemistry education to make them more interactive and exploratory, as compared to current models which are often fairly abstract and hard to manipulate.

“We have a real problem attracting people to degrees in the sciences nationwide,” says Jan Plass. “We want to design educational tools for a broader audience, so that more students can benefit from them and even learn to enjoy the sciences.”

Homer, whose work focuses on cognitive development and the symbolic understandings of children, says, “I see our work on this grant as an intersection between basic and applied research.” The team, along with NYU students, will take their enhanced models into the classrooms of New York City public high schools.

“In this study, we'll take a theory of learning and use it in representations that we think will be educationally useful and then take them to the schools,” says Milne. “Then we'll see if what we think is useful actually works in school settings. That's what is so exciting to me.”

For Arlean Wells

Her dissertation, “The Third- Grade Retention Policy in New York City: A Case Study of ‘The Left Back Group,'” analyzed the retention policy under the Michael Bloomberg administration, but was inspired by her own experience as a New York City public school child during the 1980s and 90s. Her confidence and selfesteem were hurt by being retained; few, if any, support systems were available. She fears that poor children and children of color continue to be negatively affected by the policy.

“Too many kids who look like me are not making it through the public school system,” says Wells, who is African American.

Wells's research focuses on a cohort of students who repeated the third grade and were taught as a distinct class, rather than dispersed into regular classrooms. This provided Wells with a research opportunity to compare the group's third- and fourth-grade academic achievement. She found that any achievement gains of the repeated third-grade year were lost during the fourth grade.

Her study captures the perspectives of administrators, teachers, and, perhaps, most importantly, children who are being affected by these reforms,” said her advisor, associate professor Colleen Larson of Steinhardt's Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology. “These stories and the findings of this study need to be read by policy makers and educators who truly care about children.”

While earning her Ph.D., Wells taught K-3 special education in public schools in New York. She also worked with Steinhardt's Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, first as a tutor and later as a project associate, helping to recruit and train tutors to work in public schools.

Creating opportunities for New York's underprivileged schoolchildren is her greatest passion. Last year Wells organized a conference at NYU for local high school students for whom college might seem an impossible goal. She brought 60 students from four local schools to visit NYU and participate in workshops on choosing and applying to college. The event culminated with a bus trip to Howard University in Washington, D.C.

South Africa is a destination

More information on the Educational and Social Reform program in South Africa

“On an annual basis Steinhardt sends approximately 450 students to study abroad sites in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa during January intersession and summer session,” said Helen Kelly, director of the Office of Special Programs, who coordinates the school's study abroad programs.

Moja, a South African who served as special advisor to South Africa's Minister of Education, now lives in New York City. She sees her native country as a place where “there have been great achievements in a short period of time.”

Since it started eight years ago, more than 110 students from Steinhardt, Stern, and Gallatin have visited cities and rural villages to meet people who are grappling with reform issues on a daily basis. Moja believes that many of the issues people face in South Africa are universal and she encourages her students to compare what they see in the South African classrooms to classrooms in the United States.

Colleen Larson, an associate professor in educational leadership in Steinhardt's Department of Administration Leadership and Technology, serves as the students' research guide. She has helped students structure their research on AIDS in the schools, leadership in higher education and K-12 schools, racial equity in education and employment, as well as financial and gender issues in education.

“One of the true strengths of this study abroad program is Professor Moja's connections to key policy makers and government officials in the country,” Larson says. “Because of these connections, we are able to link students to people in South Africa who not only share their concerns, but who are playing a critical role in shaping South Africa's future.”

Students describe the South African study abroad experience as one in which they were able to ‘give something back' to those less fortunate. Abby Berenson, a student in Moja's program, described a spontaneous act of charity from NYU students who pooled their pocket money to pay the Nellmapius Primary School's phone bill.

Siskin's study will focus on national survey and assessment data and field studies of schools providing the IB program along with a support system, and schools without this additional support. Some questions that the research intends to study are: What are the pathways (and obstacles) to expanding IB enrollment for disadvantaged students? What support structures and services enhance a school's capacity to ensure student access and success? What are the characteristics of students who participate and persist--and those who do not? What effect does that participation have on the students' own performance, and on the school as a whole?

In this talk, Professor Lemke will be discussing the need to combine a first- person, more phenomenological approach to video analysis that considers, among other things, the role of affect and feelings (both the researchers’ and others’) in learning and meaning making, along with more traditional semiotic-analytic 3rd person perspectives. Professor Lemke looks to computer games for how they foreground affect and afford multiple time scales and attentional spaces.

Professor Lemke’s research interests include the role of language and multimedia in learning; the study of education re-structuring and institutional change in the framework of complex systems theory and multiple timescale analysis; and how explorations of online peer networks mediate out-of-school learning and interactions with popular culture media.

He is the co-editor of the journal Critical Discourse Studies, former co-editor of Linguistics and Education, and the author of Talking Science (1990) and Textual Politics (1995).

Citing his own research, Teranishi notes that while California has tremendous diversity, 88 percent of high schools have a racial majority of one group. Of those schools, 44.7 percent have a white majority, while 43.4 percent have a black or Latino majority. Minority students who are admitted to top University of California campuses are more likely to have attended white majority schools.

Teranishi's research counters the argument that lack of merit by black students accounts for enrollment declines in post-affirmative action California.

"New York University, like all universities, creates an intimate community among the scholars and students who join us. We strive to create a residential community for our faculty and their families. Our interest in one another does not end at the classroom door; it includes the lives of spouses and children, the stories of achievements, and the times of sorrow and even tragedy. So, it is with great sadness that New York University and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development absorb the news of the death of Tumi McCallum, the daughter of two of our faculty colleagues, Teboho Moja and Robert McCallum. Every year, our halls fill with energetic and talented young people just like Tumi, and we devote our professional lives to them and their amazing potential; we understand in an immediate and personal way how tragic this death is. Our hearts break for our colleagues and their loved ones, and we grieve with them for their loss."

Contact Information

James Devitt
Phone: 212-998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu