As many of you may know, Yale is currently constructing two new residential colleges that will allow the school to admit 200 more applicants per class. Are the new colleges going to be ready by fall of 2016 and thus affect the class of 2020’s admission’s? Or are they not going to be ready until the fall of 2017 and thus not affect admissions until the class of 2021 applies?
We were told at Bulldog Days that they would not be open for the class of 2020’s admissions but the following year.
Class of 2021. Those of us who are alumni are in a heated debate over what they should be named.
How will this affect the class of 2021? That would be my daughter’s class – she is considering Yale as a recruited athlete. It appears that the one of the benefits of the residential college system is the integration of different classes. The 2021 students wouldn’t get that benefit - their college would be small - would that be viewed as less desirable and create a disadvantage to the true Yale experience?
What it means for the class of 2021 is the size of the incoming freshman class will rise from a current 1300 undergraduate students to about 1600 undergraduate students. In other words, Yale will have room for 300 more freshman, and over the next four years, will become about the same size as Harvard.
Maybe vlee is asking whether the two new residential colleges will be small (initially, anyway), and whether students assigned to them may have a different experience. That’s possible, but I predict that those students will eventually post here and say, “I am so happy to have been one of the first students in [Carefully Chosen Name] College–we bonded in a way that no other students can!” So again, don’t worry about it.
@gibby This is a question of mine too. Has Yale, to your knowledge, announced how the new colleges will be filled with upper class students? Surely they arent going to let 2/3 of the rooms sit idle the first year or, in turn, fill one college with freshman or sophomores?
I recall reading that they will house upperclassmen from other colleges who are currently housed in “swing space.” I think that would work out pretty well.
There’s already a process by which students can transfer between residential colleges. My guess (based on no inside information) is that current students would be able to transfer in to the new colleges when they open. Class of 2020 will have a really nice housing draw for their last three years, with 23% more spaces available to draw into.
Yale students don’t transfer into other residential colleges very often–it’s like family. It happens most often when there is a problem, or when somebody forms close ties with somebody in another college. I can’t imagine that many people would do it in order to get a better room draw. What I suspect will happen is that the colleges that are currently overcrowded will be allocated space in one of the new colleges instead of swing space. I hope that eventually they’ll stop using swing space altogether.
allyphoe, that’s what they said at Bulldog Days a few months ago, that upperclass students would be able to transfer to the new colleges. I imagine the details are TBD. They also said it will be about another 200 students per year starting with the class of 2021 so about 800 more total.
The “swing space” plus optional transfer makes sense. It does mean that the new colleges won’t be “complete”-i.e. have a full complement of students until the class of '23 (? math isnt my strong point).
They may also take more transfers. That’s what they did with co-education.
Another thing they can do is take more than an extra 200 people the first year.
Yale is my son’s first choice and he will be applying SCEA this year - like any student, he would be lucky to be accepted. At the same time, I do worry a little about how being the last “regular-sized” class would affect his experience, and how the addition of 600 new students before he graduates (on the way to 800) would affect class sizes, fellowships, extra-curricular opportunities, etc.
The Yale Daily News had a very good article that laid out the issues and how Yale is working to address them:
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/02/26/students-raise-concerns-over-new-colleges/
Thanks Hunt for clarifying what I meant…and baltimoreguy for the article link. It seems like this is being well thought out and I got a kick out of the hockey player comment…