Yale is adding two new residential colleges that will open in the Fall of 2017. The idea is that Yale will add 200 undergraduates per year during each of the years starting in 2017 until the new colleges are full with 800 new students. That would make the undergrad population go:
From a personal point of view, my DC is a current high school junior who is very interested in Yale. Too late to take advantage of the 15% more acceptances, and so in the first class that will subsequently be smaller than (and perhaps overshadowed by?) those that follow. So while it’s great that Yale is expanding to make its highly desirable product available to more outstanding students, I do worry there will be some growing pains along the way, and that there might be some negatives associated with graduating from a school that’s at least 10 percent bigger than the one you entered.
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts and maybe keep this thread for discussion about the new colleges as they continue to take shape.
I think Yale will do a fine job of integrating the extra students into the campus and have taken things like class size, library space, etc. into consideration.
I don’t think it will go up that much. While this is no way based on any stats but accepting 200 extra kids from a pool of 30,000+ can’t raise the acceptance rate that much. And, heaven forbid, when students actually think there are more slots, more kids will apply. So if it goes up by 1 or 2 thousand, the gains in acceptance rate will be a wash.
This plan was originally supposed to result in the new dorms being opened for the class of 2019, but the economic downturn put it on hold for a few years. I applaud Yale for making its resources available to more students. I remember reading, back when the plan was first announced, some comments from students who opposed the plan because that would make the school “less selective.” I found such comments to be selfish, as well as ridiculous.
If my math is right, if the number of applications stays the same - admittedly a big if - the acceptance rate would go up about 1 percentage point. Last year Yale admitted 1,935 out of 30,932 and 1,361 (70%) of those said yes. To get 200 more in the class if yield stays the same, Yale would need to accept 2,230 (295 more) for an acceptance rate of 7.2% versus last year’s 6.3%. So as noted above it won’t make a huge difference in the difficulty of getting in . . . except for those 295 who would have gotten “no” and will now get “yes”.
It does strike me as likely that the number of applications will go up though as the word spreads that Yale has more spots.
Regardless, I think it’s great that Yale is opening up the chance at a Yale education to more people.
“[Making] the school ‘less selective’” is a trivial concern compared to the effects on student life of eight-hundred (or perhaps one-thousand) students with the same number of professors and teaching fellows and similar facilities.
Yale’s (dubious) advantage over its “peers” is better student life. After Yale increases its undergraduate enrollment, it will not be able to claim this advantage or the distinction of superior research.
I’m concerned about this too, especially about the cohesiveness of the student body. Crowded facilities and classrooms are an issue as well, as is the the question of how the new residential colleges will be populated by upperclassmen. I wish this wasn’t happening, and I think everyone should expect some glitches—perhaps major ones—along the way. Unfortunately, the class of 2019 and onward will have to deal with these.
I wonder if Yale will simply accept 200 more students pretty much like the ones it is accepting now–or will it do something more strategic, like accepting 200 more STEM-focused students.
Good point about potential growth pains . . . hopefully those will be minimal.
In terms of pure size anyway, Yale will still have substantially fewer undergraduates than either Harvard or Stanford, for example, even after adding 800 (and Stanford is also increasing the number of undergraduates, so its population of around 7,000 will be higher in the future).
I definitely worry about the growing pains - especially for the Class of 2020. They’re going to be in the immediate shadow of the outsized freshman class. By the time they’re seniors, they’ll be smaller than every other class - I wonder if that will impact the traditional undergraduate experience which is currently such a selling point for Yale.
I don’t think that the addition of 800 students will have an appreciable impact on the overall experience of the school and it will just be 800 extra students who will be the “happiest”. Yale has been adding extra faculty over the years in anticipation. My only thought is my bias against freshman living in their college. But I am sure the thousands of alumni who lived in Silliman and Timothy Dwight will beg to differ and will say they are in for a great experience.
Have you seen Yale’s course offerings each semester? I am sure they can absorb the extra. Also, for those STEM type classes that everyone takes, I am sure they will add more sections to accommodate the influx. As an alum, its just going to be a little referring to the 14 residential colleges instead of 12 when I am doing my recruiting.
My daughter was originally sad when she was assigned to TD, as she would not have the “old campus” experience. That sadness ended within 48 hours after she moved in, and she has learned that having 4 years in her RC (considering that the annex, where most Juniors live, is literally across the street from TD) was far preferable!
As we’ve said many times, every Yale freshman is randomly assigned to the best residential college, except for legacy admits, who are permitted to choose the best residential college.
It will be interesting to see if, in combination with the Schwarzman Center (also being completed over the next few years) the center of gravity on campus shifts somewhat to the northeast. I think STEM majors would be happy to be assigned to the new colleges, which will be more convenient to Science Hill than any of the old ones.
Rice handled their growth, which was something like 30% over a few years, and the construction of new residential colleges, just fine. Yale will do likewise.
Wow. It is big news that the Faculty Senate thinks there should be (a) more faculty, and (b) more graduate students. And shocking to find that, the university having decided they were right, and the ladder faculty should be expanded to 700, here it is a year and a half before the first additional student will show up at Yale, and four and a half years before the full effect of the expansion will be felt, and they haven’t completed the faculty expansion yet! Oh no! The horror!
To add insult to injury, they are proceeding with their nefarious plans to add 20 new non-ladder writing and language instructors as a high priority. Maybe because the first place those 200 additional freshmen will really show up is freshman writing courses and introductory language courses, classes where it’s not just a matter of filling up a few more seats in a half-full classroom? Could it be that they will also hire more adjuncts or grad students to teach bio lab sections, too?
This expansion will make Yale’s undergraduate student body roughly the same size as those at Harvard, Stanford, Brown, and Chicago, instead of being the same size as Princeton and Columbia. How many people say, “I’m not going to consider Harvard or Stanford because they are too big compared to Princeton?” At Princeton, they expanded the size of the class 30% a decade ago, in connection with building Whitman College, and I’m not certain anyone noticed.
