Each year, the Dyckman Institute provides financial support to four outstanding undergraduate students who live in the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. From this and other sources, last year, approximately 26 students from these neighborhoods are currently benefiting from more than $1.1 million in need-based scholarships to attend Columbia College or Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
About the Dyckman Institute Scholarships
One of many individual need-based scholarships available to Columbia students, this program’s origins can be traced to founding father Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s widow, Eliza, donated the building and land for the Hamilton Free School — the first school in Washington Heights — in 1818. In 1860, the school became the Dyckman Library, the first free public library in Upper Manhattan. In the early 1920s, the library became the Dyckman Institute, which operated both a museum devoted to local archaeology in Inwood Hill Park and a publishing house. In 1943, the trustees of the institute decided to dissolve it and to establish a scholarship fund at Columbia for students from Washington Heights and Inwood.
