The wordmark a yellow-fever scare made necessary. New Orleans, since 1834.
Company Profile · Higher Education
Tulane University
A university that started as a cure - and never stopped treating the city around it.
A university that started as a cure - and never stopped treating the city around it.
Walk down St. Charles Avenue today and the streetcar rattles past oak trees, fraternity porches, and a 38-acre campus that does not look like an emergency room. But that is essentially how Tulane began. In 2026, Tulane is a private research university with roughly 14,000 students, about 7,700 faculty and staff, and an endowment hovering near $2 billion. It runs schools of medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work, and liberal arts. It sits among the 71 members of the Association of American Universities - the closest thing American higher education has to a velvet rope.
It is also, stubbornly, a New Orleans institution. Most universities of this size could be airlifted to any suburb and function the same. Tulane could not. Its identity is bolted to a city that floods, swelters, and throws the best parade in the country - and that has shaped what the university chooses to study and who it chooses to serve.
Four numbers, one stubborn city. The endowment figure is approximate and rounds up on a good market day.
In the 1830s, New Orleans was the busiest port in the South and one of the deadliest cities in America. Yellow fever and cholera arrived with the ships and left with the funerals. There was no reliable way to train doctors locally; the nearest serious medical schools were hundreds of miles and several outbreaks away. The math was grim and the response was slow.
Seven physicians decided the city could not keep importing its medicine. In 1834 they opened the Medical College of Louisiana - only the second medical school in the South and the fifteenth in the country - for the specific, unglamorous purpose of teaching New Orleans how to treat the things that were killing New Orleans.
That origin matters because it set a pattern. Tulane did not begin as a liberal-arts ideal looking for a campus. It began as a problem - an epidemiological one - that needed an institution. The school has spent 190 years deciding what to do with that inheritance.
By 1847 the medical college had absorbed a law school and become the public University of Louisiana. Then came the wager that gave the place its name. Paul Tulane, a wealthy merchant who had made his money in New Orleans, pledged more than $1 million in 1884 to endow higher education in the city. The public university was reorganized as a private one and renamed in his honor. The curious footnote: Paul Tulane never attended the school he transformed.
Two years later, Josephine Louise Newcomb gave money to found the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in memory of her late daughter - the first degree-granting women's college established as a coordinate within an American university. It became a model copied across the country.
Merchant. Gave $1M+ in 1884 to privatize and endow the university. Never enrolled a single day.
Founded Newcomb College in 1886 in her daughter's memory - a pioneering model for women's higher education.
Opened the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 to train doctors against yellow fever and cholera.
Seven doctors found a medical school to fight epidemic disease in New Orleans.
A law school is added and the institution becomes a public university.
Reorganized as a private university and renamed for its $1M benefactor.
A pioneering coordinate college for women is established within Tulane.
The university settles onto its present St. Charles Avenue grounds.
The oldest U.S. school of public health and the only U.S. school of tropical medicine.
Hurricane Katrina forces a closure; Tulane reopens and makes public service a graduation requirement.
Yulman Stadium returns Green Wave football to the uptown campus after decades away.
A roughly doubled endowment and the most diverse classes in school history.
What Tulane sells, if a university sells anything, is the unusual proximity of serious research to a complicated place. The School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine - the oldest of its kind in the United States and the only American school of tropical medicine - is not a coincidence of branding. It is the 1834 founding, grown up. The School of Architecture studies a city that keeps deciding whether to sink. The School of Social Work has more case studies than it can use within walking distance.
One of the oldest medical schools in the American South - the institution's original purpose.
The country's first school of public health and only school of tropical medicine.
Founded 1847; teaches both common law and Louisiana's distinctive civil-law tradition.
Liberal arts, science and engineering, business, and architecture for ~14,000 students.
Mandatory service-learning - the first such requirement at a major U.S. research university.
AAU-level research across biomedicine, coastal science, and the social sciences.
A founding story is charming. A balance sheet is persuasive. Over roughly a decade, Tulane's endowment climbed from near $1 billion to near $2 billion - the kind of growth that buys laboratories and lures faculty. The chart below traces the rough arc.
Figures are approximate and rounded; markets and reporting dates move them. Source: public university statements and press reporting.
A bar chart is a brag with a straight edge. Tulane earned this one over a decade and a hurricane.
And then there are the names. Tulane's alumni roster is the sort that makes an admissions brochure write itself: Nobel laureate Ferid Murad, whose nitric-oxide research changed cardiology; Yahoo co-founder David Filo and Netscape founder Jim Clark, who helped build the early web; Pulitzer-winning novelist John Kennedy Toole; two U.S. Surgeons General; and a Chief Justice of the United States.
Plenty of universities talk about service. Tulane wrote it into the diploma. After Hurricane Katrina forced the campus to close in 2005 - the most serious threat to the institution since its founding - Tulane reopened with a renewal plan that made public service a graduation requirement, a first among major U.S. research universities. The flood did not invent Tulane's civic streak; it just removed the option to ignore it.
It is a tidy closing of a 190-year loop. A school founded to keep a city's people alive now requires its students to go work in that city before it hands them a degree. The mission has not really changed since 1834. The vocabulary just got more institutional.
Tropical disease, coastal land loss, urban inequality, the economics of disaster - the problems Tulane studies are not getting smaller, and they are no longer confined to the Gulf Coast. A warming planet is, in a sense, turning more of the world into the kind of place Tulane was built to understand. That is a grim competitive advantage, but it is one.
Go back to St. Charles Avenue. The streetcar still rattles past the oaks and the porches. But the campus it passes is no longer the emergency response of seven worried doctors - it is one of the country's elite research universities, still pointed at the same questions, still unwilling to study them from a safe distance. Tulane began as a cure. It is still treating the patient. The patient just got larger.