Goals and values

CY Cergy Paris University is a multidisciplinary ‘Grand Établissement’ combining academic excellence, scientific innovation and active involvement in its region in order to address major contemporary challenges.

CY Cergy Paris University educates more than 26,000 students, from post-secondary education to doctorates, and conducts nationally and internationally recognised research. Its goal is to consolidate a multidisciplinary hub of excellence that is open, innovative and actively involved in addressing major contemporary issues.

The University offers vocational training programmes providing a firm foundation, a skills-based approach and enhanced support systems, contributing to an excellent graduate employment rate.

CY Cergy Paris University was founded in 1991, and fully embraces its social and environmental responsibility: developing a university reconciling social progress, quality of life, environmental transition, and scientific and economic innovation.

History

CY Cergy Paris University is young university founded in 1991, and has experienced rapid and continuous growth.

In 2020, it became an experimental public institution (EPE), with the support of the I-Site CY Initiative and in close partnership with ESSEC Business School and the CNRS. This ambitious transformation was confirmed in 2022 by an international panel.

Over the years, the University has been built on an original model combining university and engineering schools, strategic partnerships and institutions brought together within the CY Alliance, thus asserting its community presence and its innovatory growth.

In 2025, CY Cergy Paris University officially became a ‘Grand Établissement’.

Vision

The vision of CY Cergy Paris Université is built on three founding principles: 

• academic excellence,
• an international outlook,
• a strong community presence.

The University advocates an inclusive approach, striving for the success of all. It provides multidisciplinary education preparing students for the challenges of the environmental-social transition and digital transformation, fostering a culture of commitment and responsibility.

Thanks to its research teams and partners, CY Cergy Paris University contributes to scientific and societal advances through an approach based on sustained innovation and foundational projects such as CY Initiative, CY Transfer and undergraduate support programmes.

Mission

The University invests in leading-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, social sciences, engineering and the environmental transition, and develops foundational projects such as CFA CY, the CY Transfer University Innovation Hub (PUI) and internationally-recognised research programmes of excellence.

Guided by its values of inclusion, academic freedom and collective ambition, CY Cergy Paris University asserts its identity of modernity and active engagement, serving its students and the institutional, scientific and socio-economic partners that support it.