NYU or Columbia: Which Is Better for an Undergraduate Creative Writing Major?

The biggest practical difference is curricular structure: NYU offers a standalone Creative Writing major with a large, workshop-centered sequence, while Columbia treats creative writing primarily as a concentration within the English major. NYU therefore gives you more of your required academic schedule in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and other writing-focused classes. Columbia combines writing workshops with a broader literary education and its required Core Curriculum.

At NYU, students build a portfolio through introductory and advanced workshops, take craft and literature courses, and can engage with a sizable community of student journals, readings, and working writers in Greenwich Village. This is especially appealing for a student who already knows they want sustained workshop training and wants most classmates to be similarly focused on making new work.

Columbia’s Creative Writing concentration can be excellent, particularly because of the caliber of its workshops, visiting writers, readings, and New York City publishing connections. But the English major and Core mean that your education will be more deliberately split among literature, philosophy, history, science, languages, and writing. That structure can strengthen a writer’s range and intellectual reference points, but it offers less room for a heavily specialized creative-writing course load.

For an undergraduate whose priority is to major explicitly in creative writing and take the deepest possible sequence of workshops, NYU is the clearer choice. Choose Columbia instead if its Core Curriculum, broader English foundation, and the option to develop as a writer alongside a more structured liberal-arts program are central to what you want from college.