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Yale College to Expand Enrollment by 15 percent
July/August 2008
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
It’s official: Yale will build two new residential
colleges and expand its undergraduate enrollment by 15 percent, the university
announced on June 7. Yale’s governing board, the Yale Corporation, formally
approved the plan at its regular June meeting. In a letter to alumni, President
Richard Levin said that the university has already raised $140 million in gifts
and pledges toward the new colleges, and that the goal of the current university
fund-raising campaign has been changed from $3 billion to $3.5 billion to
accommodate the new building plans. He also said that the colleges are expected
to open in 2013.
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The college now admits fewer than 10% of candidates who apply.
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The Corporation’s decision was long expected. Ever
since the university’s expansion proposal became public in the fall of 2006,
insiders have suggested that the plan was a done deal. A study group convened
last year considered the implications of expansion and solicited opinions from
the Yale community, but the question all along seemed less whether to expand
than how. The most vocal objection to the idea came from current
undergraduates, some of whom expressed concern that even a modest expansion
would reduce the intimacy of the Yale College experience.
Levin cited Yale’s increasing selectivity as a reason
for the decision to expand. Because the number of people applying to Yale has
doubled in recent years, the college now admits fewer than 10 percent of
candidates who apply. “Admissions officers agree that in each of the past several
years we have denied admission to hundreds of applicants who would have been
admitted ten years ago,” Levin writes. The expansion will “allow us to make an
even greater contribution to society by preparing a larger number of talented
and promising students of all backgrounds for leadership and service.”
Yale’s most recent freshman class had 1,320 students.
A 15 percent increase would add about 200 students to that total and eventually
increase the overall undergraduate population from 5,275 to just over 6,000.
Levin writes that the faculty will also be expanded “to sustain our favorable
ratio of students to teachers, particularly in highly subscribed majors.” In
addition to expanding enrollment, the new colleges will allow Yale to reduce
the population of the existing residential colleges by about 140 students
overall, alleviating overcrowding and the need to house students in annex
housing outside the colleges.
The new colleges will be built north of the Grove
Street Cemetery near Science Hill, on a Yale-owned site bounded by Prospect,
Sachem, and Canal streets. In public forums over the past year, Yale
undergraduates expressed skepticism about the site’s remoteness from what they
view as the core of the campus. But Levin writes that the colleges in fact will
“alter the perception that Science Hill is 'too far away' from the 'center' of
campus. … The new colleges have the potential of making the whole campus
seem smaller.” He adds that improvements to Prospect Street and
student-activity spaces on or near the site—as recommended in the study group's
report—will help make the area more attractive.
The announcement did not address the issue of what
the new colleges will be called. Levin has already said, though, that they will
not be named for donors but will continue in the tradition of the other 12
colleges, which are named for people and places in the university’s
history.  |
