Yale will expand undergraduate student body by 15 percent

Yale will build two new residential colleges and increase its undergraduate student body by 15 percent by the fall of 2013, its largest expansion in 40 years, President Richard Levin announced Saturday.

In a letter to Yale alumni, faculty and students, Levin wrote that Yale College will grow to accommodate roughly 6,000 undergraduates. The new residence halls will be the most expensive ever built on the campus of an American university, with a total construction cost of $600 million.

“This 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,” Levin said.

The Yale Corporation — the university’s 19-member governing body — formally approved the expansion at its meeting this weekend. Yale, however, has spent the last decade preparing for the project, purchasing enough land to build the new colleges and reaching out to potential donors.

Student reaction to the effort has been mixed. A poll commissioned by the Yale Daily News in February found that only one in four undergraduates supports the expansion. While many students came out against the plans at public forums last fall, Levin publicly announced his support for the project on Feb. 19, and the Corporation endorsed it a week later.

The same poll showed that 60 percent of students were not pleased with the proposed construction site, located behind the Grove Street Cemetery along Prospect Street in New Haven. The location is at the base of an area known as Science Hill, half a mile from the center of Yale’s campus. In addition to misgivings about isolation, some students also think expanding the student population may overburden the faculty.

Levin responded to those concerns in his letter.

“I believe that the presence of undergraduate residences north of Grove Street will alter the perception that Science Hill is ‘too far away’ from the ‘center’ of campus,” he said.

“The new colleges have the potential of making the whole campus seem smaller, more effectively linking Science Hill with the historic center,” he said, adding the project will connect the university’s science facilities with the rest of the campus by adding new classroom space, a student cafe, exercise facilities and a theater. The plan also calls for expanding the faculty, revising academic advising and expanding student research and study abroad opportunities.

Yale provost Andrew Hamilton told the YDN that the administration will work to make sure the new colleges do not threaten Yale’s culture.

“But in my opinion, there is one part of the Yale College culture that needs to be damaged, and that is the isolation of the sciences,” said Hamilton, a former assistant chemistry professor at the University. “This is not a culture that we should be proud of.”

Hamilton, who leaves Yale next year to become vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, said he hopes the expansion will accomplish just such a change.

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“Putting two new residential colleges there will have that very important effect on changing the perception of Science Hill among our undergraduates,” he said.

Yale students currently live in 12 residential colleges, and — like at Princeton — each college has a master, dean and fellows. The last significant increase in the size of the student body at Yale came with the admission of women in 1969.

Since that time, Yale has expanded in nearly every other way — faculty and staff, library and museum resources, and the physical plant.

In recent years, the university has seen a significant increase in applicants and a corresponding decline in acceptance rate. Yale accepted just 8.3 percent of those who applied for the Class of 2012. Levin cited this low rate as one reason to expand the student body.

“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,” he said. “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.”

To help fund the project, the Corporation also increased the goal of Yale’s current capital campaign “Yale Tomorrow” from $3 billion to $3.5 billion. The campaign is already an entire year ahead of schedule and has so far not included any funding for the new colleges. Levin said the university already has $140 million in gifts and pledges for the new colleges.

In the coming months, attention will turn to the names of the new colleges and the architectural style in which they will be built. Yale officials have said neither will be named after living donors, and administration officials told the YDN that the colleges will most likely be built in a traditional Georgian style.

Yale follows other schools that are currently expanding residential facilities and the size of their undergraduate student body. In September 2007, Princeton opened the 500-bed Whitman College, a $136 million project that, along with existing Mathey College, launched the four-year residential college system at Princeton. The University is also following plans to increase its undergraduate population by 11 percent to a total of 5,200 students by 2012.