Mercy College (Mercy or Mercy NY) is a private university with its main campus in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and additional locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Yorktown Heights. The university is historically affiliated with the Catholic church. Mercy College has five schools: Business, Education, Health & Natural Sciences, Liberal Arts and Social & Behavioral Sciences, and offers more than 90 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs. The university had 11,295 students enrolled in fall 2015. The student body comes from 43 states and 54 countries. History Founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1950, Mercy College became a four-year college offering programs leading to the baccalaureate degree in 1961. The college was accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in 1968. In the next half-decade, Mercy College set a course for its future with a series of actions including declaring itself independent and co-educational. In addition, it doubled the size of the existing physical plant and initiated the first of many community outreach efforts. Mercy College in the 1970s broadened its outreach through the establishment of extension centers and branch campuses throughout communities in Westchester County and New York City. Mercy College was authorized to offer its first graduate program, nursing, in 1981. Since then, over 30 diverse graduate programs have been introduced, and in 2006, the college was granted authorization to offer its first doctoral program in physical therapy. The college expanded its offerings to include online programs in the 1990s, and was soon granted the ability to offer entire degree programs online. Thousands of Mercy College students take one or all of their courses online through the more than 40 undergraduate and graduate programs offered. In 2004, Timothy L. Hall, the former president of Austin Peay State University, as well as the former provost of University of Mississippi, became the 12th president of Mercy College. In January 2017, founding dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and associate vice president for academic affairs at Western New Mexico University, as well as a former program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. José Herrera, was appointed the new provost and vice president of academic affairs of Mercy College. In early 2019, Mercy College and the College of New Rochelle announced that College of New Rochelle (CNR) would be absorbed into Mercy College before Fall 2019, including College of New Rochelle's students, faculty, programs,