Yale University

“A world-class research university built around 14 residential colleges and an unrivaled commitment to the arts, humanities, and public life.”

Yale University, founded in 1701, is one of the world's great universities and the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. What distinguishes Yale College — its undergraduate division — is a residential college system modeled on Oxford and Cambridge: every undergraduate, after their first year on Old Campus, is assigned to one of 14 residential colleges, each with its own dining hall, library, courtyard, gym, seminar rooms, head of college, and dean. The colleges produce intensely loyal, lifelong communities within the larger university, and much of Yale's social and intellectual life happens inside their gates. Yale College offers more than 80 majors across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and engineering, anchored by a distributional curriculum that prizes breadth, writing, and quantitative reasoning. The university is known historically for its strength in the humanities, arts, and public life — the Yale School of Drama, Yale School of Music, Yale Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, the Whiffenpoofs (the oldest collegiate a cappella group in the world), and the Yale Daily News (the oldest college daily in the US) reflect a campus where creative, literary, and civic expression are treated as seriously as scientific achievement. Directed Studies, Yale's intensive first-year humanities program, immerses ~120 students per year in foundational texts of Western civilization. The School of Engineering and Applied Science has grown substantially in recent years, adding strength in computer science, biomedical engineering, and applied data science. New Haven, once stigmatized, has been transformed into one of the most genuinely exciting college towns on the East Coast, with a nationally celebrated restaurant scene, a thriving arts and music culture, and direct Amtrak access to New York City (90 minutes) and Boston (2.5 hours). Yale's compact, walkable downtown campus — 345 acres of Gothic quadrangles, modernist libraries, and new science towers — gives students an unusually direct connection to civic and urban life. Yale is need-blind for all applicants including international citizens, meets 100% of demonstrated need without loans, and is one of only a handful of US universities to make that commitment to the world.