At a Glance
Yale admits 4.7% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Debt at Graduation
54.8%
receive need-based grant aid
$21,228
average debt at graduation
Yale graduates carry an average of $21,228 in debt.
Merit Aid
Not reported by this school — some schools award aid based on need alone, without merit scholarships.
Getting In
Yale admits 4.7% of applicants.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 67% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 25% of the class submitted
97% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
Yale University rates your personal essay as Very Important — equal weight to your GPA. Don't underestimate it. Demonstrated interest is Not Considered here — campus visits and emails to admissions won't affect your odds.
Student Life
73.1% of Yale classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At Yale, 73.1% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
9:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
Live on campus
77%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
Yale's student body is 29.8% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
Yale graduates 52.8% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
Yale graduates 52.8% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
Yale
52.8%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $88,300
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
96.3%
Overall 6-yr rate
94.5%
Pell recipient rate
Lower-income students graduate at nearly the same rate as their peers — a sign of strong institutional support.
Freshman Retention
99.4%
99.4% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in New Haven.
New Haven is a mid-size Connecticut city built around a historic town green that Yale's campus wraps directly around, mixing Gothic quadrangles with a downtown known for its own style of thin-crust “apizza.” It's a real city with its own economy — Yale-New Haven Hospital and a growing biotech cluster anchor it — rather than a satellite of somewhere else, though Manhattan is close enough by train to be a regular weekend option rather than a special trip.
Notable Alumni
George H.W. Bush
41st President of the United States. Captained the Yale baseball team, which played in the first two College World Series, before graduating in economics in 1948.
Class of 1948
Meryl Streep
Three-time Academy Award winner, earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1975.
Class of 1975
Sonia Sotomayor
First Latina justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979.
Class of 1979
Anderson Cooper
CNN anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent, graduated in political science in 1989.
Class of 1989
Eli Whitney
Invented the cotton gin and pioneered interchangeable-parts manufacturing after graduating in 1792; Yale's nontraditional-student admission pathway is named for him.
Class of 1792
Frank Shorter
Won Olympic gold in the marathon at the 1972 Munich Games, sparking the American distance-running boom, after graduating in 1969.
Class of 1969
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Mid-size city
New Haven, CT
Best For
Traditions
The Game
The Yale-Harvard football rivalry, played every fall since 1875 and known on both campuses simply as “The Game” — one of the oldest continuous rivalries in American sports.
The Whiffenpoofs
Founded in 1909, the oldest collegiate a cappella group in the country. The current fourteen seniors sing every Monday night at Mory's, the private dining club the group's signature song is named for.
Handsome Dan
Yale's bulldog mascot, first adopted in 1889 and often credited as the first live mascot in American college sports. The current dog is Handsome Dan XIX.
Residential colleges
All fourteen residential colleges house and feed their own students for all four years, each with its own dining hall, courtyard, dean and head of college — the structure that organizes most of undergraduate social life, modeled on Oxford and Cambridge.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from New Haven
New York City
About 1 hour 45 minutes by trainMetro-North and Amtrak both run from Union Station, a short walk from campus, into Grand Central — one of the best train connections to Manhattan of any college in the country.
Mystic & the Connecticut shoreline
About 45 minutesMystic Seaport, Mystic Aquarium and the small beach towns along the Long Island Sound coast.
The Litchfield Hills & Berkshires
About 1 hour 15 minutesRolling hills, hiking and fall foliage in northwest Connecticut and western Massachusetts.
Boston
About 2 hoursA straight shot up I-95 or a train via New Haven's rail connections, for a bigger city with its own college-town energy.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Tweed New Haven Airport (HVN)
About 15 minutes from campus
For international flights: John F. Kennedy International (JFK) — about 1 hour 45 minutes by road, or by train into manhattan and the airtrain from there.
Pro sports nearby
- New York Yankees MLBAbout 1 hour 45 minutes away
- New York Giants NFLAbout 1 hour 45 minutes away
- New York Knicks NBAAbout 1 hour 45 minutes by train away
Career Proximity
Yale-New Haven Hospital and a biotech cluster spun out of Yale's own labs anchor the local economy, and Manhattan is under two hours away by train for finance, media and consulting internships.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Yale-New Haven Hospital
- Arvinas
- The Hartford
- Travelers
New Haven's own hospital and biotech sector, with Hartford's insurance industry about 40 minutes north and New York under two hours south by train
Who Thrives Here
Yale admits 4.7% of applicants and offers no early decision plan, only a restrictive single-choice early action round that doesn't bind you to enroll if admitted. It reinstated the SAT/ACT requirement for the class entering in 2025, with flexibility to submit AP or IB scores instead of a traditional test. The aid is need-based only — Yale awards no merit scholarships at all — but it's real: 100% of demonstrated need is met for the 54.8% of undergraduates who receive it, and graduates who borrow leave owing an average of $21,228. One number needs context: 52.8% graduate in four years against 96.3% within six — a wide gap on its own terms — so a family should ask what a fifth semester typically looks like here rather than assume the six-year figure describes a delay-free path. Daily life runs through the residential college system — all fourteen colleges come with their own dining halls, courtyards and traditions, and 77% of undergraduates live in college housing overall — a structure closer to Harvard's Houses than to a typical dorm-and-Greek-life campus; Yale's own CDS reports no measurable fraternity or sorority presence.