New York University, which receives more applications for undergraduate admission than any other private school in America, topped Harvard and Yale for the third year in a row as students’ first choice, according to Bloomberg News.

Harvard University came in second in the “dream school” survey of 3,890 college applicants, Princeton Review Incorporated said today in a statement. Princeton, Stanford, and Yale universities followed.

Princeton Review, a test-preparation and admissions-services company in New York, published the findings as part of its “College Hopes & Worries Survey,” a poll it has conducted annually since 2003. Next on the students’ lists were Brown, Columbia, Duke, and Cornell universities, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Students are looking for a rich cultural experience in addition to a rich learning experience,” said Peter Stokes, a senior analyst for Eduventures, an education market researcher in Boston.

New York University has received a record 35,000 applications for the class of 2010, a spokesman, John Beckman, said. The university has seen its applications more than triple from about 10,000 in 1990. Founded in 1831, the school enrolls a total of about 39,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

“Students are coming because of the renown of our academic programs, the connection of the city to its industries, and the opportunities for internships that this brings,” Mr. Beckman said.

The top ranking comes as NYU announced a $200 million gift, one of the largest in its history, from the Leon Levy Foundation. The grant will finance the university’s new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, which will open its doors to doctoral candidates in the fall of 2008. The institute will focus on Central and East Asia as well as Europe and the Mediterranean in a multidisciplinary curriculum that will include art history, geography, economics, and sociology.

The institute will be housed in a century-old 27,000-square-foot, six-story townhouse at 15 E. 84th St. in Manhattan, the former home of the American Jewish Congress, which was bought by the Levy Foundation in 2004. It is being renovated by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. “Traditional boundaries inhibit the discovery of important insights,” the president of NYU, John Sexton, said by telephone from Mexico. “One of the hallmarks of what I wanted NYU to be is the idea that we would move beyond traditional barriers or disciplines. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World will bring to antiquity the technique of breaking boundaries.”

Mr. Sexton said the new institute will have its own faculty, as well as a roster of visiting scholars and research fellows. A search for a director will begin shortly, he said, and “professors will be chosen for their expertise, acuity and action in boundaries broken.”

Mr. Sexton credited Levy and his widow, Shelby White, as the philosophical inspiration behind the new enterprise. Levy, who died in 2003, served as vice chairman of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Ms. White said other universities were considered for the gift, but that NYU “seemed like it would be the best place.” She said the new institute would not house her personal collection of antiquities, considered one of the finest in the world.

During his lifetime, Levy supported a wide range of archaeological and scholarly programs, including excavations at the ancient site of Ashkelon in Israel, the Shelby White-Leon Levy Travel Grant program for students at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications at Harvard.

The $200 million gift to NYU matches one announced nearly simultaneously by Columbia University for a neuroscience center from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation, the largest in the school’s history.