Focus on Yale in China
Located in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University, which was set up in year 1701, is the third oldest university in America, following Harvard and College of William and Mary. While Harvard puts more attention on graduate education and College of William and Mary is better at undergraduate education, both the graduate and undergraduate education in Yale are among the top in the world, and are powerful competitors for the world’s top 3 place.
With its strong faculty, scholastic innovation, curriculum and completed infrastructures, Yale has always enjoyed equal fame with Harvard and Princeton.
In year 2006, Yale University had more than 21,000 applicants, while those who got admitted were only 8.6% of this number. Being a member of the Ivy League, Yale in year 2006 was named the 2nd hardest-to-enter school for students by Princeton Review. Yale is famous for its humanities subjects, such as art, history and law. Its science and engineering is relatively weak among America’s best universities. Over the years, over 71% admitted students finally choose Yale. Most of them who did not go to Yale were dreaded by its high tuition, while Yale provides scholarships and financial assistants to its students. Financial aid receivers occupy about 41.9% of all undergraduates.
Yale’s asset includes 15,200 million dollars of charitable donation, which is the 2nd largest amount in the world’s study institutions. It has about 3,200 teachers and professors, 5,200 undergraduates and over 6,000 graduates. Apart from Harvard, Yale has the most winners of Rhodes Scholarship.
Yale College, the undergraduate school of Yale, has 70 majors, few of which are highly professionalized. Even the engineering major encourages students to explore knowledge in subjects other than engineering. 20% of Yale’s students study majors in natural sciences, 35% study majors in natural sciences, and 45% choose humanities or arts. In Yale Program of Study, there are over 2,000 courses for students to choose from.
Yale has many famous celebrity alumni. Among the many elite scholars of Yale, there are 13 Nobel Prize winners. There are five Presidents of America: William Howard Taft, Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr, George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and George Walker Bush. Clinton met his wife, the current America’s secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, in the library of Yale. The famous actresses Jodie Foster and Jennifer Sue Beals are all graduates from Yale’s college of arts. Meryl Streep, the 17-time-Oscar nominee, graduated from its college of drama. The famous actor, Edward Norton, graduated from Yale’s history major.
Interestingly, several of Yale’s graduates have become other top universities’ starting headmasters, such as Princeton, Cornell, John Hopkins, Columbia and Chicago.
There are many outstanding Chinese that received their education in Yale. Zhan Tianyou(詹天佑), whose method of building a ‘人’ shaped railway to cope with sharp turns for trains is still widely used today, graduated from Yale’s civil engineering major. Ying Kaishi(应开识), with his master’s degree in Yale’s major of education, made great contribution to China’s education, and was named one of the top five alumni who made the greatest contributions in year 1988 by his university, and won Yale’s highest honor medal. Maya Ying Lin(林樱), niece of Phyllis Lin(林徽因), the famous architecture, has her masterpieces all over America, graduated from Yale’s school of architecture.
Yale has exchange programs with China’s famous universities, such as Renmin University of China(中国人民大学), Central South University(中南大学), Peking University(北京大学), Tsinghua University(清华大学), Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学), and Shanghai Jiaotong University(上海交通大学).
Edited by Amy Wang from Daxue Consultant China
Credit Photo: Baidu
