The city of Ithaca,, sits on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, in Central New York, USA. It is best known for being home to Cornell University, an Ivy League school with almost 20,000 students (most of them studying on Cornell’s Ithaca campus). Ithaca College is located just south of the city in the town of Ithaca, adding to Ithaca’s “college town” focus and atmosphere. The city of Ithaca is the center of the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area (which also contains the separate municipalities of the town of Ithaca, the village of Cayuga Heights, the village of Lansing and other towns and villages in Tompkins County). The city is the county seat of Tompkins County. In 2000, the city's population was 29,287, and the metropolitan area had a population of 100,135. 2004 estimates puts the city population at 29,952, an increase of 2.3%. Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca is the North American seat of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.