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 is a member of the Ivy League. Yale has educated five U.S. presidents, 18 Supreme Court Justices, as well as many foreign heads of state.
In 1861, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences became the first U.S. school to award the Ph.D.
The university’s assets include a US$17 billion endowment (the second-largest of any academic institution) and more than a dozen libraries that hold a total of 12.5 million volumes (making it, according to Yale, the world’s second-largest university library system).Yale has 3,300 faculty members, who teach 5,300 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate students.Yale offers 70 undergraduate majors: few of the undergraduate departments are pre-professional. About 45% of Yale undergraduates major in the arts and humanities, 35% in the social sciences, and 20% in the sciences.All tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.[citation needed] Yale’s graduate programs include those in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — covering 53 disciplines — and those in the Professional Schools of Architecture, Art, Divinity, Drama, Forestry & Environmental Sciences, Law, Management, Medicine, Music, Nursing, and Public Health.
Yale’s residential college housing system is modeled after those of Oxford and Cambridge. Each residential college houses a cross-section of the undergraduate student body and has its own facilities, seminars, resident faculty and graduate fellows.
Yale and Harvard have been rivals in academics, chess, rowing, and football for most of their history, competing annually in The Game and the Harvard-Yale Regatta. (more…)