A 23-year-old New York University graduate student died yesterday after falling from an upper floor of the university’s arts school, stunning a campus that has seen seven students die in the past year.

Police found the body of Joanne Michelle Leavy lying on the street adjacent to the Tisch School of the Arts, where Leavy was a second-year film student. Leavy lived just a block away with her parents on Waverly Place, and witnesses said they saw her run frantically out of her apartment and across the street toward the 12-story Tisch building. Minutes later, she was dead.

Classes start today at NYU, where Leavy is the second student to die in a week. Five undergraduates died in fatal falls in the last year, two inside the university’s cavernous Bobst Library last fall, one from an apartment near campus, and the last two from Midtown buildings in the spring. Four of the deaths were ruled suicides, bringing national notice to a university whose prestige and popularity has skyrocketed in the last decade.

“Any student death is a cause for sadness; this one, coming at the start of the school year and echoing the unprecedented sorrow we confronted as a community last year, tears at our collective heart especially strongly,” said NYU’s vice president for student affairs, Marc Wais, in an e-mail sent to all students.

As news spread of Leavy’s death, students expressed disbelief that another NYU student had apparently jumped from a building. Coming just days after the mysterious death of a sophomore, NYU faces an potential onslaught of concern from parents and students wondering why so many students have died in a short period of time and what the university can do to prevent further tragedies. NYU officials will try to reassure the university community that they are providing a safe environment for students. They may also weigh further protective measures that might have the effect of bringing more attention to the problem.

The circumstances surrounding Leavy’s death are murky. The superintendent and doorman of her apartment building at 11 Waverly Place said she scrambled out of the building shortly after 10 a.m. in a clearly agitated state.

“She ran out of the building in kind of a frantic way, saying, ‘Don’t tell my father, don’t tell my father,'” said the superintendent, John Lemieszewski. He said Leavy often fought with her parents, whom she lived with, and that she would sometimes run out after an argument. He described her as quiet and reserved.

Mr. Lemieszewski said he didn’t see Leavy fall, but soon after she left, police gathered around a block-long section of Mercer Street, where Leavy landed. He said police then came to inform Leavy’s parents, who emerged from the building in tears.

Leavy would have been able to access the Tisch building with her student ID, even though a sign posted at its Broadway entrance said it was closed for the Labor Day holiday. An NYU official said the roof door was unlocked.

“This guy ran over and said there was a girl lying in the street,” said Erin, a glassblower from North Carolina who was setting up her booth at the Washington Square Art Show. The woman, who declined to give her last name, said the body was naked and twisted up against the curb.

Leavy was a 2003 graduate of Brown University. Brooke Sebold, a close friend of Leavy’s at Brown, described her as “eclectic” and “unbelievably smart” but said she didn’t like NYU. “I know she wasn’t very happy at NYU. She didn’t like to conform to anything,” Ms. Sebold said.

University officials have maintained that the suicides reflect a national, and not a school-wide, mental health problem. Still, NYU’s president, John Sexton, has taken several preventive measures, ranging from expanded counseling services to the installation of barriers around the balconies of the library to ward off jumpers.

Just this new academic year, NYU created a 24-hour hotline, a central resource much like the city’s 311 line, that students can call for any problem they may be having.

“There is an incredible amount of concern,” said an NYU spokesman, Josh Taylor. “Last year, we spent a lot of time reflecting on what had gone here.”

While the rate of suicides among college students, especially at NYU, has drawn attention in recent years, it is actually lower than the national average, according to report released in April by a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The suicide rate for college students is 7.5 out of 100,000, which is about one-half the frequency for young adults who don’t go to college, wrote Paul Joffe, the author of the report.

Suicide is “such a small-numbers phenomenon that numbers can move from nothing to substantial without meaning very much,” Mr. Joffe told the Sun. “These things tend to run in streaks.”

NYU officials said they believe their new counseling services will help students who are depressed or suicidal. But they also said there is only so much they can do.

“From the very beginning, we struggled to find the right line between ensuring the safety and well-being of our students and making them all feel like we consider them at risk,” said the spokesman, Mr. Taylor. “We continue to try to walk that line. At the end of the day, if someone is determined to take their life, they are going to find a way to do it.”

On the NYU campus yesterday, students preparing for their first day of class found the news of another apparent suicide hard to believe.

“It’s just shocking,” said Yoly Rueda, a junior who had recently moved into an apartment at 11 Waverly Place, the same building where Leavy lived with her parents. “It’s giving the school a bad name.”

Leavy’s death comes five days after NYU sophomore Spenser Kimbrough died in NYU Downtown Hospital. Kimbrough was rushed to the emergency room after telling a friend at his Lafayette Street dormitory that he didn’t feel well.

An initial autopsy last week was inconclusive, and the city medical examiner is awaiting the results of toxicology and tissue sample reports to determine a cause of death.