Yale was established as the Collegiate School in 1701 by Congregationalist clergy of the Connecticut Colony. Originally restricted to instructing ministers in theology and sacred languages, the school's curriculum expanded, incorporating humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale's faculty and student populations grew rapidly after 1890 due to the expansion of the physical campus and its scientific research programs.
Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools, including the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Yale Law School.[8] While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of 2023, the university's endowment was valued at $40.7 billion, the third largest of any educational institution.[1] The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States.[9][10] Student athletes compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.
Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", a would-be charter passed during a meeting in New Haven by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701. The Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. Soon after, a group of ten Congregational ministers, Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather (nephew of Increase Mather), Rev. James Noyes II (son of James Noyes), James Pierpont, Abraham Pierson, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, and Timothy Woodbridge, all alumni of Harvard, met in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell, located in Branford, Connecticut, to donate their books to form the school's library.[16] The group, led by James Pierpont, is now known as "The Founders".[17]
Undergraduate admission to Yale College is considered "most selective" by U.S. News.[153][154] In 2022, Yale accepted 2,234 students to the Class of 2026 out of 50,015 applicants, for an acceptance rate of 4.46%.[155] 98% of students graduate within six years.[156]
Through its program of need-based financial aid, Yale commits to meet the full demonstrated financial need of all applicants, and the university is need-blind for both domestic and international applicants.[157] Most financial aid is in the form of grants and scholarships that do not need to be paid back to the university, and the average need-based aid grant for the Class of 2017 was $46,395.[158] 15% of Yale College students are expected to have no parental contribution, and about 50% receive some form of financial aid.[156][159][160] About 16% of the Class of 2013 had some form of student loan debt at graduation, with an average debt of $13,000 among borrowers.[156] For 2019, Yale ranked second in enrollment of recipients of the National Merit $2,500 Scholarship (140 scholars).[161]
Half of all Yale undergraduates are women, more than 39% are ethnic minority U.S. citizens (19% are underrepresented minorities), and 10.5% are international students.[158] 55% attended public schools and 45% attended private, religious, or international schools, and 97% of students were in the top 10% of their high school class.[156] Every year, Yale College also admits a small group of non-traditional students through the Eli Whitney Students Program.
The U.S. News & World Report ranked Yale third among U.S. national universities for 2016,[153] as it had for each of the previous sixteen years. Yale University is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education.[173]
Internationally, Yale was ranked 11th in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities, tenth in the 2016–17 Nature Index[174] for quality of scientific research output, and tenth in the 2016 CWUR World University Rankings.[175] The university was also ranked sixth in the 2016 Times Higher Education (THE) Global University Employability Rankings[176] and eighth in the Academic World Reputation Rankings.[177] In 2019, it ranked 27th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings.[178]
Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".[179] The National Science Foundation ranked Yale 15th among American universities for research and development expenditures in 2021 with $1.16 billion.[180][181]
Yale's current faculty include 67 members of the National Academy of Sciences,[12] 55 members of the National Academy of Medicine,[13] 8 members of the National Academy of Engineering,[14] and 187 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[15] The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.[182] It also is a top 10 (ranked seventh) baccalaureate source (after normalization for the number of graduates) of some of the most notable scientists (Nobel, Fields, Turing prizes, or membership in National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, or National Academy of Medicine).[183]
Yale's English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the department of comparative literature from the late 1970s to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called "Yale School". These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale's history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale's Music School and department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.
Since the late 1960s, Yale produces social sciences and policy research through its Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS).
In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association