Yale to Expand Undergraduate Enrollment by 15 Percent

The president of Yale University announced on Saturday that Yale will increase its undergraduate enrollment by 15 percent, to about 6,000, by building two new residential colleges that are expected to open in 2013.

In a letter to alumni, faculty, students and staff, Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, said that Yale College, the undergraduate program, admits fewer than 10 percent of the more than 20,000 people who apply each year.

“We have a long queue of highly qualified applicants who collectively would allow Yale to make an even greater contribution to society if more could be educated here,” he wrote. “In addition, since the late 1970s, when the undergraduate population ceased to grow, Yale is larger in virtually every dimension: faculty, staff, library and museum resources and physical presence. We are well poised, therefore, to expand.”

The last significant increase in the student body, he said, came with the admission of women in 1969. In recent decades, the undergraduate enrollment has fluctuated between 5,150 and 5,350.

“This plan is about expansion of the student population and integration of the entire campus,” said Janet Emanuel, associate director of public affairs.

Yale students live in 12 residential colleges, each with its own master, dean and fellows. The new colleges will be built in a triangle just north of the Grove Street Cemetery, a plan that Dr. Levin said would help connect the science facilities to the rest of the campus.

“The new colleges have the potential of making the whole campus seem smaller, more effectively linking Science Hill with the historic center,” his letter said.

To support the undergraduate expansion, Yale Corporation has authorized an increase in the goal of the Yale Tomorrow fund-raising campaign to $3.5 billion from $3 billion.

Yale is one of the nation’s richest universities, with a $22.5 billion endowment — nearly $2 million for each of its undergraduate and graduate students — that is second only to Harvard’s $35.6 billion endowment.

The Yale endowment, which has led the academic world in investment performance over the past decade, posted a 28 percent return for the fiscal year that ended in June 2007.

Under pressure from Congress and some donors to use more of its multibillion-dollar investment gains, Yale announced in January that it would spend an additional $307 million next year in income from its endowment.

At the time, Dr. Levin said the money would be used for financial aid, scientific and medical research and a likely expansion of the student body.

Yale is not the only university with a large endowment to be thinking about expansion. Princeton, Stanford and Amherst College have all moved in the same direction.

New York Times

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: June 8, 2008