A New York University junior jumped 10 stories to his death inside a library early Tuesday, police and university officials said.

Andrew E. Williamson-Noble, 20, of Irvington, N.Y., was found unresponsive in the lobby of Bobst Library on Washington Square in Manhattan about 4:30 a.m., police said.

A police source said that using an identity card, the victim "swiped himself in, went to the 10th-floor balcony and jumped."

The student was a junior in the College of Arts and Science, university president John Sexton said in a schoolwide e-mail.

Williamson-Noble was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead around 5 a.m., officials said. An investigation is ongoing.

"The impulse for self-harm - particularly among young men and women with so much talent and so much to live for - is incomprehensible to me," Sexton wrote.

Not counting Tuesday's, the university has had six suicides in as many years, prompting the school to block access to building balconies.

Bobst Library has an atrium design. NYU installed Plexiglas barricades on every floor above the second level of the library in 2003 in response to previous suicides committed there, according to John Beckman , a school spokesman.