<p>Shawbridge, the undergraduate "Yale College" is completely central to the institutional characteristics of Yale, because of the way the institution is structured. In many ways, if you look at the facts and figures, Yale is more of an undergrad-focused "LAC" than even most LACs. </p>
<p>First, you have to understand how corporate board decisions are made to really have an understanding of who is top in the pecking order. At Yale, undergraduate alumni have long made all the decisions and the funding and attention given to undergraduate programs reflects that. Much of this influence is due to the relative size of the programs. It is true that Yale has extremely prestigious professional schools, but they largely run on their own (with their own faculty and finances) and also, are relatively small in terms of enrollment. Yale Law for example only has about 200 students per class, versus 600 per class at many of the other top law schools. Overall, 1/2 the students at Yale are undergraduates, with many of the others divided among about 10 small professional schools, compared to 1/3 at, for example, Harvard, with non-undergrad enrollments concentrated at other large schools such as HBS. If you do not count all the professional schools which are largely separate anyways, the vast majority of students at Yale are undergraduates.</p>
<p>Second, the layout of the campus itself can be important. At Yale, the undergraduate campus represents the center of campus, surrounding the library and professors' offices, while professional schools and graduate housing/programs are usually located slightly farther away. This means all of the undergraduate dormitories are within a 2-3 minute walk of each other, which is great in terms of social life. In that sense, no other universities are as compact as Yale.</p>
<p>Besides that structure, the only way to evaluate how undergrad-focused an institution is to look at the actual program. To do that, you need to talk to as many students and professors as possible about their thoughts in terms of the quality of the undergraduate program. Also, you can do things like look at the student-faculty ratios in the most popular departments (not across the institution as a whole), such as history, political science, psychology, economics or biology, areas where pretty much every student ends up taking a class or two, and where a significant fraction if not the majority of the student body actually majors. For example, last time I checked,, Yale had over 100 professors in its history department for 5,000 undergraduates (1:50); Brown had about 40 for 6,000 undergraduates (1:150); Harvard had about 80 for 6,500 (1:80), and many top LACs had 10 or 15 for about 1,500-2,000 undergraduates (1:100, sometimes a little better, sometimes not). In biology and other sciences, the ratio I calculated for Yale after adjusting for the number of science majors was, like Caltech's, about 1:2 or better; at Cornell, for example, it is more like 1:10. It's important to do any of this carefully, because you have to consider a lot of other factors as well. You can also look at class size statistics, but it is very hard to gather reliable ones that reflect the true experiences of a typical student without actually going and counting them yourself, and if you can, they typically just reflect the numbers above. U.S. News's figures for example shows Yale has pretty much the smallest class sizes out there. A better way, like I said above, is just to ask a bunch of students and faculty about it and judge for yourself. Anyhow, if an institution is truly undergraduate-focused, faculty will be somewhat concentrated in the areas that undergraduates actually major in, and class sizes will be small.</p>