Yale University | History, Schools, Alumni, & Facts (2024)

Yale University, private university in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the eight Ivy League schools, widely regarded for their high academic standards, selectivity in admissions, and social prestige.

Yale was founded in 1701 and is the third oldest university in the United States. It was originally chartered by the colonial legislature of Connecticut as the Collegiate School and was held at Killingworth and other locations. In 1716 the school was moved to New Haven, and in 1718 it was renamed Yale College in honour of a wealthy British merchant and philanthropist, Elihu Yale, who had made a series of donations to the school. Yale’s initial curriculum emphasized classical studies and strict adherence to orthodox Puritanism.

Yale’s medical school was organized in 1810. The divinity school arose from a department of theology created in 1822, and a law department became affiliated with the college in 1824. The geologist Benjamin Silliman, who taught at Yale between 1802 and 1853, did much to make the experimental and applied sciences a respectable field of study in the United States. While at Yale he founded the American Journal of Science and Arts (later shortened to American Journal of Science), which was one of the great scientific journals of the world in the 19th century. Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, begun in the 1850s, was one of the leading scientific and engineering centres until 1956, when it merged with Yale College and ceased to exist.

A graduate school of arts and sciences was organized in 1847, and a school of art was created in 1866. Music, forestry and environmental studies, nursing, drama, management, architecture, physician associate, and public health professional school programs were subsequently established. The college was renamed Yale University in 1887. Women were first admitted to the graduate school in 1892, but the university did not become fully coeducational until 1969. A system of residential colleges was instituted in the 1930s.

Yale is highly selective in its admissions and is among the nation’s most highly rated schools in terms of academic and social prestige. It includes Yale College (undergraduate), the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and 12 professional schools.

The Yale University Library, with more than 15 million volumes, is one of the largest in the United States. Yale’s extensive art galleries, the first in an American college, were established in 1832 when John Trumbull donated a gallery to house his paintings of the American Revolution. Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History houses important collections of paleontology, archaeology, and ethnology.

Yale’s graduates have included U.S. Presidents William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; Civil War-era leader John C. Calhoun; theologian Jonathan Edwards; inventors Eli Whitney and Samuel F.B. Morse; and lexicographer Noah Webster. After several years of debate, in 2017 the university announced that the name of Calhoun College, one of the original residential colleges, would be changed to Hopper College, after the 20th-century mathematician, naval officer, and Yale alumna Grace Hopper. Advocates of the renaming had argued that it was inappropriate for the university to honour Calhoun, who had been an ardent proponent of slavery and a white supremacist.