Just in case you have been, purposefully, hiding under a rock, mustering every residual effort to dissociate yourself from the disruption and atrocity that has been occurring in the country and in the world these couple of weeks, this is a mild wake-up dosage reminding you that: things are shit.

It’s as if the despise of the administration has trickled into the definition of being a Columbian. Most of us share a sweet-sour relationship against the institution into which our overachieving young selves once so eagerly plunged. While such moral paradox lingers at the back of the minds of every Columbians, I stumbled across a blog post exhibiting concretely what we all might already know.

Drawing data from New York City Department of Planning and Department of Finance, Aleksey Bilogur, self-acclaimed civic data analytics junkie and avid Wikipedian, was able to compile a list of top landowners in New York City. To absolutely no one’s surprise, our beloved neoliberal alma mater reigns supreme.

Among New York University, Duestche Bank National Trust, the trustees of Columbia trumps all other private landowners by the number of addresses held.

However, if we were to look at land property in terms of Single-apartment bathroom footprint (which is about 750 square feet), Columbia placed second.

And finally, the big question: who is the richest private landowner in the Big Apple? Bilogur suggested that despite Columbia having 206 properties and NYU, significantly lesser, 96 properties, NYU’s prime location in Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park makes it the richest landowner with a sizable margin to the runner-up, Columbia.

NYU finally placed before us on some list

Here is a visualization of your tuition:

Of course, without further interpretation, the statistics Bilogur presented are merely numbers. The question — of whether an educational institution should be accumulating so colossal a capital — remains under debate. It is confounding, however, with so much money, why it takes the school so long to fix the automatic door in front of Furnald Hall. Seriously.

All photos and data via Aleksey Bilogur