According to Yale Daily News, the Ivy League university is reported to have a record size student body for the 2021-2022 school year.
The largest incoming class since World War II, the class of 2025 houses a population of 1,789 students. This represents 240 students more than the norm, which has led to increased demand for classes and housing.
To address demands, Yale has enlarged first-year and sophomore-year courses to increase capacity, hired additional instructors for introductory courses, and hired postdocs for upper-level seminars. Such careful planning has allowed for flexibility on the university’s part. For housing, the university has broken tradition and decided to divide the freshman class across campus. Some students are residing in their respective colleges while others are living on Old Campus in Benjamin Franklin, Pauli Murray, Silliman, and Timothy Dwight residential colleges. The Schwarzman Center has also opened to increase capacity for dining and programming.
This growth in the undergraduate population at Yale can partly be attributed to the 335 students from the class of ‘24 who chose to defer their acceptance to take gap years. Yale’s surge in population is not an anomaly. For example, Columbia’s class of 2025 has 2,358 students and is the largest the school has seen in recent years. This is a trend also observed at Harvard, where more than 300 students accepted into the class of ‘24 deferred to the class of ‘25.
