Still, an education at Tandon may be out of reach for many New Yorkers: The total sticker price to attend for on-campus N.Y.U. students, which includes Tandon, is currently more than $83,000 a year.
Lower-income students typically pay less because of financial aid — about $23,000 in the 2020-21 school year, according to federal data — but they can still expect to pay significantly more for an education at N.Y.U. than at many other higher-education institutions in the city, including public colleges and some private universities like Columbia.
Ms. Kovacevic, the dean, insisted the latest upgrade would not result in higher tuition fees. N.Y.U. has been trying to make itself more affordable and increase financial aid for students, she added.
She added that the funding “was needed because no university can achieve sort of national or international status without the viable technology school.”
Anthony Concolino, a Polytechnic alumnus who is now a tech executive at Wells Fargo, described the school as an underdog that was starting to gain ground.
“We do compete with the bigger schools, but obviously you can’t compete if you can’t grow,” Mr. Concolino said. “We never had the same kind of research staff, teaching staff, classroom capacity, but we always felt that we were like this small powerhouse of an engineering school that wanted to be an M.I.T.”
The school has had at least two Nobel winners pass through its halls in its long history: Rudolph A. Marcus, a former professor at Polytechnic, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems; and Martin L. Perl, a Polytechnic alumnus, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics.
And the cables used to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge were designed by Polytechnic students. Those cables then paved the way for skyscrapers to be built in Manhattan, introducing the concept of elevators.