College Intel

Yale University Admissions

Located on a beautiful Gothic-style campus in historic New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University is one of the most prestigious postsecondary institutions both in the world and within the Ivy League. Yale has a reputation for educating the world’s political, economic, and cultural leaders: five former U.S. presidents call themselves alumni, along with several foreign heads of state, 263 Rhodes Scholars, and 31 living billionaires. Between a student body of 6,600 undergraduates and 5,300 postgraduates, Yale draws the best and brightest to take part in a centuries-long legacy of academic excellence.

Schools in the Ivy League run the gambit of levels of academic rigor, and Yale, arguably, sits at the top of this spectrum, along with Columbia. But perhaps surprisingly, Yale College has no core curriculum. 80 possible majors are offered, each of which contain their own curricular requirements fulfilled by choosing from roughly 2,000 undergraduate courses. All students must complete distribution requirements in the humanities and arts, the sciences, and the social sciences, and “skill area” requirements, which consist of courses in writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language acquisition. This approach encourages flexibility, risk taking, and the cultivation of genuine academic passions. 

The centerpiece of undergraduate social life at Yale is the residential college system. Established in 1933 and modeled after the constituent colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, Yale’s 14 residential colleges provide housing, amenities, dining halls, and social events for nearly all undergraduates. The typical first question Yale alumni will ask when meeting one another is to which college they were affiliated. 

Student organizations on campus have storied histories as some of the oldest in the country within their respective categories, such as the Yale Literary Magazine (the oldest student literary magazine in the country), The Yale Record (the world’s oldest humor magazine), and The Yale Daily News (the oldest daily college newspaper in the country). Intramural and collegiate sports teams play each season, but Yale’s athletic spirit is highest when the football team faces off against Harvard at the Harvard-Yale game each fall. When it comes to parties and elite organizations, Yale boasts both Greek life and a bevy of secret societies (which we’d love to tell you more about, but alas, they’re well-kept secrets!). 

Yale was founded in 1701 by Harvard alumni who feared that their alma mater was slipping away from the tenets of Puritan orthodoxy on which it was founded. Thus, Yale’s early years were marked by a curricular focus on ancient languages and biblical texts for the sons of New England’s elite. In the nineteenth century, Yale expanded its graduate offerings, first with the School of Medicine in 1810, and then the Divinity and Law Schools in 1822. Yale awarded the first Ph.D. in the U.S. in 1861. Women were allowed to enroll as undergraduates in 1969 after university administration declined an invitation to merge with sister school Vassar College, opting for their own coeducational path.

Today, the country’s third oldest institution of higher education is known for its library of 15 million volumes, its history of influential faculty such as Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sidney Altman, and Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck, and its renown in nearly all major areas of higher learning. For admission to the Class of 2027, Yale admitted a slim 4.5% out of 52,303 applicants, giving it one of the lowest college acceptance rates in the world. The Yale College Undergraduate Admissions states that they look for applicants who “pursue what [they] love and tell us about that,” or applicants who will make the most out of the vast resources afforded to them. In other words, they want to ensure that prospective students are passionate enough to seek out and succeed at the sorts of opportunities that will be available on campus. Luckily for you, Ivy Coach is here to help you convey that you’re this very student who is worth taking a chance on!