Yale University

Overview

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university which is the third-oldest higher education institution in the US. Yale traces its history back to 1701, when it was founded as the Collegiate School in Saybrook, Connecticut, which moved to New Haven 15 years later. In 1718 it was renamed Yale College, in honour of Welsh benefactor Elihu Yale, and it was the first university in the US to award a PhD, in 1861.

The university is made up of 14 schools, and students follow a liberal arts curriculum, covering humanities and arts, sciences and social sciences before choosing a departmental major. Students also receive instruction in writing skills, quantitative reasoning and foreign languages. Unusually for the US, Yale students are housed in residential colleges on the model of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There are 12 historic colleges, and construction of two more started in 2014. Yale has an endowment that exceeds $25 billion (£17.3 billion), making it the second-richest educational institution in the world, and a library that holds more than 15 million volumes, making it the third-largest in the US.

Four Yale graduates signed the American Declaration of Independence, and the university has educated five US presidents: William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Twenty Yale alumni have won Nobel prizes, including economist Paul Krugman, while 32 have won the Pulitzer Prize.