The college is coeducational and nonsectarian.
It is the seat of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station and of Hobart College (nonsectarian), which was first planned in 1812, was founded in 1822 (the majority of its incorporators being members of the Protestant Episcopal church) as successor to Geneva Academy, received a full charter as Geneva College in 1825, and was renamed Hobart Free College in 1852 and Hobart College in 1860, in honour of Bishop John Henry Hobart.
At Peekskill are the Peekskill military academy (1833, nonsectarian); St Mary's school, Mount St Gabriel (Protestant Episcopal), a school for girls established by the sisterhood of St Mary; the Field memorial library; St Joseph's home (Roman Catholic); the Peekskill hospital, and several sanatoria.
New Brunswick is the seat of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in America, the oldest theological school in the United States, founded in 1784 in New York City, situated at Flatbush, Long Island, in 1796-1810, and removed to New Brunswick in 1810, and of Rutgers College (originally Dutch Reformed, now nonsectarian), which was founded in 1766 as Queen's College, was rechartered in 1770 as a college for "the education of youth in the learned languages, liberal and useful arts and sciences and especially in divinity," was first opened for instruction in 1770, was closed during1795-1807and 1816-1825, and was renamed in 1825 in honour of Colonel Henry Rutgers (1745-1830), of New York City, a liberal benefactor.
White, his fellow member of the state senate, decided to found a university of a new type - which should be broad and liberal in its scope, should be absolutely nonsectarian, and which should recognize and meet the growing need for practical training and adequate instruction in the sciences as well as in the humanities.