Financial Statements Released for Fiscal 2025
Dear members of the Columbia Community,
I am writing to share that the University’s financial results for fiscal 2025 are posted and available on the University’s website. As we reflect on the fiscal year ended June 30, and the activity represented in these results, I want to express gratitude for the tremendous focus and commitment required to steward the resources of this institution over the last year.
Financial Overview
The University’s financial statements for its fiscal year 2025 report net assets of $20.5 billion, an increase of 3.7% from fiscal 2024. This growth arises from a positive contribution from operating results, as well as a net contribution from non-operating activities, which includes the University’s endowment return. Growth in the endowment from investment returns and gifts provides a perpetual source of dedicated funding for university activities, including financial aid, faculty support, and research. Also reflected within our non-operating activities in FY25 are accrued expenses for the entirety of our recent federal settlement, and remaining expenses related to malpractice settlements that reflect the resolution in 2025 of longstanding matters.
The University’s balance sheet remains strong, reflecting the increases in net assets noted above. Our liquidity position is solid, noting that on June 30 we had a significant balance in receivables related to government grants which have since been paid. The University issued $500 million of debt early in the 2025 fiscal year, which, along with draws on our tax-exempt commercial paper program, helped to support liquidity and fund ongoing capital projects. At year end, leverage remains at manageable levels.
Operating Revenue and Expenses
Within operating income, revenues increased 2.1% and expenses increased 5.3%. Revenues reflect modest growth in net tuition (within which is an embedded increase of 4.6% in financial aid), and strong patient care revenue from increased clinical activity and the delivery of programs and services with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Revenue from government grants and contracts is essentially flat compared to FY24 and reflects a complex picture: a strong first half of the year, and tempered levels of activity in the spring as a large volume of awards was initially terminated in March and later reinstated. Gift revenue decreased compared to an extremely strong FY24, though notably, pledges increased. We are deeply grateful to our donors for their continued commitment to the University.
Expenses reflect personnel and non-personnel costs to effectively run our campus, and in 2025, substantially higher expenses for external support as the University sought additional expertise to coordinate responses to new levels of government inquiry. Service and programmatic enhancements for our students and patients were prioritized, and funds were deployed to provide support to our research enterprise when external funding was uncertain. Parallel cost containment efforts, at the school and central University levels, allowed us to make these investments and still to generate a modest operating surplus, albeit lower than our historical average. This surplus represents aggregate funds generated across all of our schools and business units. Importantly, funds generated from operations enable us to fund critical capital projects that support the maintenance and renovation of our physical infrastructure. These capital investments are distinct from our operating expenses and rely on a consistent operating surplus as a funding source, along with philanthropy and debt. The University’s ongoing cost containment efforts remain important to preserve financial flexibility and ensure that resources are allocated in a manner consistent with our priorities for excellence in teaching, research, and patient care.
Further Commentary
As referenced above, the University experienced a major destabilizing event, which was the termination of hundreds of federal research grants in March 2025. As we record $1.3 billion in government grant revenue for the fiscal year, roughly equivalent to the revenue received in the previous fiscal year, the face of our financial results does not adequately capture the level of strain experienced by the research enterprise in the third and fourth quarters.
Columbia received terminations of more than 350 grants this past spring, and separately, federal reimbursements were paused for most of the University’s active, non-terminated grants. The University’s central administration provided a financial backstop for our terminated grants while our impacted schools implemented response plans to preserve research continuity where possible and provided funding for active awards while federal reimbursement was withheld. The University entered into a resolution agreement with the federal government in July 2025 and shortly thereafter, all 260 grants that were part of resolution agreement were fully reinstated, federal reimbursements resumed, and the University was repaid for the expenses we carried for our active award portfolio over the course of the spring.
Our FY25 financial results reflect the tremendous resilience of our researchers, the sense of community across the enterprise, and the communications and coordination that occurred at multiple levels of the organization to maintain and sustain excellence during a period of tremendous anxiety and operational disruption. We were able to successfully navigate those challenges due to the efforts of those who directly support the research enterprise, and the work of deans and administrators who implemented meaningful new cost controls to conserve and reallocate resources where they were needed most.
The desire to move beyond these turbulent times is strong and understandable. We know, however, that the landscape for federal funding for higher education will continue to evolve, through programmatic shifts in federal priorities and changes in funding models, such as recovery rates for space and research support functions, with profound effects. The muscles that we strengthened this past spring will be critical going forward: nimbleness, resolve, creativity, and fiscal prudence. Importantly, the strategic work that began this spring, to help us affirm our priorities and undertake the hard work of resource allocation to bring those priorities to fruition, is continuing.
One particular strength at Columbia is the ability of our deans to lead their schools with a deep commitment to excellence amid challenging financial times and periods of uncertainty. We have seen this demonstrated many times before—during the financial crisis of 2008-09, during COVID, and most recently, this past year. I am grateful for their vision and stewardship, and know these qualities are also appreciated by our alumni who have entrusted us with resources to continue to make Columbia stronger and better.
Columbia’s financial model is such that we rely heavily on the acumen of our deans to make seemingly impossible choices about resource allocation. At times, that means holding the course to preserve flexibility when potential external impacts are not yet known. Accordingly, this past spring, many schools and departments held salaries flat and froze hiring, as a response to the instability and uncertainty ahead. Given the headwinds that face our sector, in many areas we will continue to stay the course. In several areas, we have significant cost reduction efforts underway, the results of which will enable us to make future investments to bolster our competitive strengths. It is a complex backdrop, and our assessments are more dynamic and frequent.
We are working with our deans to assess the spending levels necessary now to support their schools and the delivery of continued outstanding student and patient experiences. In some cases, we recognize certain schools may provide mid-year adjustments to compensation, with a particular focus on our lower-paid employees, and we have provided the flexibility to make such decisions.
Our community often asks how to consider the University’s endowment as a resource to meet our needs in this moment. Certainly, we are proud of recent strong endowment returns and grateful to our donor community for the solid base of ongoing financial support that our endowment provides. The annual distribution from our endowment to fund operations for FY2025 was 4.9% of endowment assets, which we believe is an appropriate level of annual support for our student financial aid, faculty-led research, programs, and campus operations. An annual distribution of this proportion also ensures that we are enabling the endowment to grow and preserving its spending power over time, as the costs for activities that the endowment supports also continue to grow.
This spring and into fiscal 2026, due to the disruptions in federal funding for research, we chose to tap certain centrally managed, unrestricted endowment funds on a modest scale to contribute to the University’s Research Stabilization Fund (RSF). The RSF provided more than 500 internal grants to our researchers in June and September. These funds are vital to ensure continuity of research programs and stability of our teams within the research enterprise, and to provide seed funding for researchers to pivot and ultimately diversify their funding sources. In conjunction, we scaled back some endowment-dependent activities within the central administration, to repurpose those funds for the RSF. Because tapping endowment for one-time purposes erodes our future capacity to provide support for programs that are dependent on the annual distribution, utilizing endowment assets in this way, beyond our annual distribution, is a rare and multi-faceted decision which we do not make lightly.
Conclusion
We hope this detailed summary illustrates the considered approach the University is taking to navigate the road ahead. I am deeply appreciative of all who have worked to help us emerge from this period of particular instability with a sustained and solid financial position. The enduring commitment to excellence in service to our students, research objectives and patients, even against a shifting external landscape, is remarkable. Thank you for sharing in that commitment.
Sincerely,
Anne Sullivan, Executive Vice President for Finance
For additional financial information, please see our Financial Overview page.