About Yale University

Yale University is located in historic New Haven, Connecticut, a port city with a population of 125,000 about 120 kilometers northeast of New York City and 200 kilometers southwest of Boston. Founded in 1701, the University consists of twelve schools: Yale College, the four-year undergraduate school; the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and ten professional schools. Yale College, the heart of the University, provides instruction in the liberal arts and sciences. More than 2,000 undergraduate courses are offered each year by over sixty-five departments and programs, forming a curriculum of remarkable breadth and depth. The faculty is dedicated to undergraduate teaching, a commitment for which Yale has long been well known. Many of Yale's most distinguished professors teach introductory-level courses.

Yale's History

Yale's roots can be traced back to the 1640s, when colonial clergymen led an effort to establish a college in New Haven to preserve the tradition of European liberal education in the New World. This vision was fulfilled in 1701, when the school's charter was granted. In 1718 the school was renamed "Yale College" in gratitude to the Welsh merchant Elihu Yale, who had donated the proceeds from the sale of nine bales of goods together with 417 books and a portrait of King George I.

Yale College survived the American Revolutionary War (1776-1781) intact and, by the end of its first hundred years, had grown rapidly. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the establishment of the graduate and professional schools that would make Yale a true university. The Yale School of Medicine was chartered in 1810, followed by the Divinity School in 1822, the Law School in 1824, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1847 (which, in 1861, awarded the first Ph.D. in the United States), followed by the schools of Art in 1869, Music in 1894, Forestry & Environmental Studies in 1900, Nursing in 1923, Drama in 1955, Architecture in 1972, and Management in 1974. The University began admitting women students at the graduate level in 1869, and as undergraduates in 1969.

Residential Colleges

Yale College was also transformed, beginning in the early 1930s, by the establishment of residential colleges. Taking medieval English universities such as Oxford and Cambridge as its model, this distinctive system divides the undergraduate population into twelve separate communities of approximately 450 members each, thereby enabling Yale to offer its students both the intimacy of a small college environment and the vast resources of a major research university. Each college surrounds a courtyard and occupies up to a full city block, providing a congenial community where residents live, eat, socialize, and pursue a variety of academic and extracurricular activities. Each college has a master and dean, as well as a number of resident faculty members known as fellows, and each has its own dining hall, library, seminar rooms, recreation lounges, and other facilities.

Yale Today

Yale has matured into one of the world's great universities. Its 11,000 students come from all fifty American states and from over 110 countries. The 2,000-member faculty is a richly diverse group of men and women who are leaders in their respective fields. The central campus now covers 170 acres (69 hectares) stretching from the Nursing School in downtown New Haven to tree-shaded residential neighborhoods around the Divinity School. Yale's 225 buildings include contributions from distinguished architects of every period in its history. Styles range from New England Colonial to High Victorian Gothic, from Moorish Revival to contemporary. Yale's buildings, towers, lawns, courtyards, walkways, gates, and arches comprise what one architecture critic has called "the most beautiful urban campus in America." The University also maintains over 600 acres (243 hectares) of athletic fields and natural preserves just a short bus ride from the center of town.

Yale is in the midst of the largest investment in its facilities since the 1930s. A new School of Art complex has opened, and new science and environmental laboratories, as well as a new athletic center and student residence, have been erected. There have been major renovations of both historic academic buildings and the undergraduate residential colleges. In the decade ahead, the University will invest an equal amount in facility improvements for the benefit of students and scholars alike.

The Library

Noteworthy on campus is the University library system, which holds well over eleven million volumes in general and specialized fields as well as various area and subject collections, archives, recordings, maps, and other artifacts. It is America's third-largest library, and the world's second-largest university library. Although centrally catalogued, the system is housed in over forty locations around campus, ranging from the majestic Gothic edifice of Sterling Memorial Library, containing about half of Yale's total collection, to the modern geometries of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which protects more than 800,000 irreplaceable books and documents.

Galleries and Museums

Also enriching campus life and research are the University's extensive collections. The Yale Art Gallery, founded in 1832, today houses a collection that has grown to rank with those of the major public art museums in the United States. Its two connected buildings house ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art, Near and Far Eastern art, archaeological material from the University's excavations, Pre-Columbian and African art, works of European and American masters from virtually every period, and a rich collection of modern art. Across the street, the Yale Center for British Art, which opened in 1977, holds the largest collection of British art and illustrated books anywhere outside the United Kingdom.

Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, founded in 1866, contains one of the great scientific collections in North America. Among its holdings are the University's comprehensive mineralogical and ornithological collections, the second-largest repository of dinosaur artifacts in the United States, and the largest intact Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus) in the world. The Peabody is truly a working museum, where public exhibition, research, conservation, teaching, and learning intersect.

Institutions like the Art Gallery, the Center for British Art, and the Peabody Museum hold only a portion of the treasures in the University's collections. From paintings by Picasso, to pterodactyl remains, to a 1689 tenor viol in the Collection of Musical Instruments, Yale's possessions are meant to be accessible to the communities they enrich. Yet for all the depth of the University's holdings, Yale's greatest resource is undoubtedly its people. Just as students are inspired by the example and teaching of their professors, the faculty are continually rejuvenated by their students' explorations and fresh perspectives.

Science and Engineering

Yale is so distinguished in the humanities and social sciences that many people don't realize that it is also one of the United States' top scientific research universities. Yale's departments of biology, chemistry, molecular biophysics and biochemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, environmental science, geology and geophysics, and other scientific fields are consistently rated at or near the top of national rankings. The resources and study facilities available to undergraduates in all these areas of study, as well as in biomedical, chemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineering, are superb.

Building upon these strengths, Yale is investing more than $500 million to expand and upgrade its laboratories and teaching facilities in the sciences and engineering over the next decade, as well as an additional $500 million in its research facilities in medicine and biotechnology.

Yale's Growing International Activities

Yale's engagement beyond the United States dates from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, when faculty members first pursued study and research abroad. Yale was also at the forefront of welcoming foreign students: the first student from Latin America arrived in the 1830s, and the first Chinese national to matriculate at any U.S. college or university arrived at Yale in 1850.

Today the University is extensively involved in international studies, offering over fifty foreign languages and more than 600 courses related to international affairs. The MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies has for four decades been a focal point and now offers six undergraduate majors and four master's degree programs as well as many research activities. The Center for Language Study, Center for the Study of Globalization, and Center for International Finance augment the growing set of international programs and activities in Yale's professional schools.

Yale is proud of the growing complement of international students studying on campus. Yale College admits students from all over the world under a policy that does not consider their financial resources ("need-blind admission") but makes sufficient financial aid available in order to cover the costs of a Yale education ("need-based financial aid"). This policy awards financial aid to international students on the same generous terms that are available to students from the United States. In this way, Yale strives to attract the strongest candidates for undergraduate admission from around the world. Some of the graduate programs enroll more than thirty percent of their students from abroad, and foreign students constitute sixteen percent of the student body across the University. The World Fellows Program brings emerging leaders from around the globe to Yale each fall, and nearly 1,900 foreign scholars from over 100 countries are in residence annually.