Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Particularly well-known are its undergraduate school, Yale College, and the Yale Law School, each of which has produced U.S. Presidents and foreign heads of state. Also notable is the Yale School of Drama which has produced many prominent Hollywood and Broadway actors.
The university’s assets include an $18 billion endowment (the second-largest of any academic institution in the world) and more than a dozen libraries that hold a total of 12.1 million volumes. Yale has 3,200 faculty members, who teach 5,200 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate students.
Yale’s 70 undergraduate majors are primarily focused on a liberal curriculum, and few of the undergraduate departments are pre-professional in nature (even the engineering departments encourage and require students to explore academic disciplines outside of engineering). About 20% of Yale undergraduates major in the sciences, 35% in the social sciences, and 45% in the arts and humanities. All tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.
Yale uses a residential college housing system modeled after those at Oxford and Cambridge. Each of 12 residential colleges houses a representative cross-section of the undergraduate student body, and features numerous facilities, seminars, resident faculty, and support personnel.
Yale’s graduate programs include those in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences - Biology, Classics, English, Pure, Applied and Engineering Sciences, History, Math, Sociology, Political Science and Economics - and those in the Professional Schools of Architecture, Art, Divinity, Drama, Forestry & Environmental Sciences, Law, Management, Medicine, Music, Nursing, and Public Health.
Yale and Harvard have for most of their history been rivals in almost everything, notably academics, rowing and football.
Yale president Richard C. Levin summarized the university’s institutional priorities for its fourth century: “First, among the nation’s finest research universities, Yale is distinctively committed to excellence in undergraduate education. Second, in our graduate and professional schools, as well as in Yale College, we are committed to the education of leaders.”
Website: www.yale.edu