Accredited Online Colleges in New York (NY)

Students planning on studying or making a career in the great state of New York should prepare to see some higher living costs when compared to most states in the Union with the average cost of living 24.4 percent higher than the national average. Despite a higher than average cost of living, New York has seen a steady population increase of 2 percent since 2000. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, New York had a population of more than 19,000,000 people with almost half of those residents calling New York City, the nation’s largest city, home. Being the third largest state in the U.S. also brings an extremely diverse cultural demographic to the state.

Although half of New York’s residents are packed tightly into one city, the rest of the state still offers plenty of options in terms of careers and culture. Outside of the more than 8 million residents of New York City, the state’s second largest city, Buffalo, holds more than a quarter million residents and also has the greater Niagara Falls area to add to its greater metropolitan area. Rochester and Yonkers fall into the number three and four spots respectively, hovering around the 200,000 mark. Syracuse, home to one of the state’s most well known universities, Syracuse University, is the fifth largest city with 141,000 residents. Other key city is the state capital of Albany, the sixth largest city in the state, with 97,000 residents.

New York’s unemployment rate comes in just 0.8 percent below the national average rate of 8.8 percent from March 2010 to March 2011. During that same time frame however, private sector jobs increased by 1.4 percent. The vast majority of New York’s jobs come in from sales and professional sectors as well as management, business and financial occupations. Combined, those categories account for more than 50 percent of the states workers. A significant number of which is concentrated in New York City as it is the country’s leading center of banking and finance thanks in part to the New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest stock exchange by dollar volume.

Academically, New York is home to some of the world’s most prestigious private universities and is the nations’ only state that contains two Ivy League schools, Columbia University in New York City and Cornell University located in Ithaca. Fordham University, the country’s oldest Catholic University is also located in New York City as well as famed arts hub NYU. New York also offers a strong network of public universities through its system known as the State University of New York, or SUNY. The SUNY offers 64 different campuses with four major university centers: University at Albany, Binghamton University, The University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. The state is also home to West Point, the service academy of the U.S. Army. With a vast array of colleges and universities New York has something for everyone but offers a particularly strong list for those interested in business, the arts and communications.