The Liberal Arts Curriculum at Yale University: A Tradition of Broad and Deep Learning
Yale University, situated in New Haven, Connecticut, embodies a unique blend of a research university and a liberal arts college. For over 300 years, Yale has been driven by the constant pursuit of innovation and tradition. Students from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, identities, and interests converge in a global intellectual community that cherishes a multifaceted approach to undergraduate education. Yale seeks to educate students who are broad-minded and autonomous, capable of making judgments and taking responsibility for their decisions. A Yale College education should encourage students to become curious, engaged citizens.
A Single College, Limitless Options
Yale undergraduates enroll in a single liberal arts college with 80 majors to choose from. All students begin their studies without a declared major, giving them access to all the same courses without the restrictions of a core curriculum. Students choose every course themselves, with the benefit of multiple academic advisors. This allows for exploration and discovery of new interests and abilities. The College does not seek primarily to train students in the particulars of a given career, although some students may elect to receive more of that preparation than others.
Research Opportunities and Career Support
Yale offers extensive research opportunities. 95% of undergraduate science and engineering majors conduct research with faculty. Yale has more than 1,200 labs that award more than $1 million in annual research fellowships for first-year students alone. The Yale Office of Career Strategy works with students starting in their first year to provide pre-professional advising, assistance with graduate school applications, and workshops and networking opportunities throughout the year.
The Residential College System
The unique Residential College housing system is at the heart of the Yale College experience. Each undergraduate is randomly assigned to one of fourteen Residential Colleges: close-knit communities that serve as a microcosm of Yale’s diverse student population for all four years. For almost a century, the residential colleges have created enduring communities that are an essential part of the broader Yale ecosystem. As a distinctive community of learning, Yale College also seeks to instill an ethos of service-a sense of belonging on campus and a call to contribute beyond it. Participation in the College and University communities requires respect and tolerance and a willingness to listen to one another.
The Core of the Curriculum: Breadth and Depth
Yale College, the undergraduate branch of Yale University, offers instruction in more than 120 subjects spanning the liberal arts, sciences, and engineering. Yale’s distributional requirements stipulate two course credits in each of three disciplinary areas: the humanities and arts, the sciences, and the social sciences. Yale is committed to the idea of a liberal arts education through which students think and learn across disciplines, liberating or freeing the mind to its fullest potential. Yale graduates in all majors are prepared to serve in positions of leadership in every imaginable field. There are no specific classes you must take at Yale, but you are required to learn broadly and deeply. Depth is covered in your major. Breadth is covered in three study areas (the humanities and arts, the sciences, and the social sciences) and three skill areas (writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language).
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Instead of requiring a fixed set of courses for all students, often called a core curriculum, Yale requires a distribution of studies. Such study is characterized, particularly in the earlier years, by a reasonable diversity of subject matter and approach, and in the later years, by concentration in a major.
Humanities and Arts
Through the study of the humanities and arts - those subjects that explore how we chronicle and interpret the expression of human experience - students gain insight into the experiences of others while also obtaining an opportunity to critically examine their own. Through the study and practice of the arts, students analyze, create, and perform works allowing them to explore or experience firsthand the joy and discipline of artistic expression. Rigorous and systematic study of the humanities and the arts fosters tolerance for ambiguity and sophisticated analytic skills that provide essential preparation for a variety of careers in multiple spheres.
Sciences
Science is the study of the principles of the physical and the natural world through observation and experimentation. The theoretical inquiry, experimental analysis, and firsthand problem solving inextricably linked to scientific inquiry give rise to new modes of thought. Acquiring a broad view of what science is, what it has achieved, and what it might continue to achieve is an essential component of a college education. Close study of a science develops critical faculties that educated citizens need to evaluate natural phenomena and the opinions of experts, and to make, understand, and evaluate arguments about them.
Social Sciences
Broadly conceived, the social sciences study human social behavior and networks using a variety of methodologies and both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The disciplines in the social sciences teach us about who we are as social beings and help us appreciate the perspective of the other as well as the particularities of society. Methods in the social sciences test for connections between the familiar and the foreign, the traditional and the contemporary, the individual and the group, the predicted result and the anomalous outcome. Their theories propose explanations for the entire range of human phenomena.
Foundational Skills: Writing, Quantitative Reasoning, and Language Competency
In addition to the disciplinary area requirements, Yale’s distributional requirements stipulate course credits in each of three skills: writing, quantitative reasoning, and language study. In each skill, students are required to travel some further distance from where they were in high school so that each competence matures and deepens. The best high school writer is still not the writer he or she could be; students who do not use their quantitative or language skills in college commonly lose abilities they once had and can graduate knowing less than when they arrived.
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In addition, the College requires that all students take courses that develop certain foundational skills- writing, quantitative reasoning, and language competency-that hold the key to opportunities in later study and later life. People who fail to develop these skills at an early stage unknowingly limit their futures.
Writing
The ability to write well is one of the hallmarks of a liberally educated person and is indispensable for advanced research in most disciplines and success in many careers.
Quantitative Reasoning
The application of quantitative methods is critical to many different disciplines. Mathematics and statistics are basic tools for the natural and the social sciences, and are useful in many of the humanities as well.
Language Study
The study of languages has long been one of the distinctive and defining features of a liberal arts education and, in the world of the twenty-first century, knowledge of more than one language is increasingly important.
International Opportunities
In a time of increasing globalization, both academic study of the international world and first-hand experience of foreign cultures are crucial. Such experience may include course work at foreign universities, intensive language training, directed research, independent projects, internships, laboratory work, and volunteer service. Yale College provides a variety of international opportunities during term time, summers, and post-graduation, as well as a large and growing number of fellowships to support students abroad.
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The Philosophy Behind the Curriculum
Before you begin your undergraduate career at Yale, you should know something about Yale’s philosophy of education. Yale College offers a liberal arts education, one that aims to cultivate a broadly informed, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. Such an approach to learning regards college as a phase of exploration, a place for the exercise of curiosity, and an opportunity for the discovery of new interests and abilities.
The idea of the liberal arts originates in 4th-century B.C. Athens when, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors discuss the necessary curriculum for the citizens of the Republic. Among other things, Socrates points out that any technical skill or craft can be used for good or evil, so the crucial part of education becomes how we learn to tell the difference between them. Socrates thus focuses attention away from what the Greeks called techne or craft and towards the importance of addressing our deepest questions-questions such as what is good, what is wisdom, what is virtue, what is justice? We ask these questions in the service of discovering what it means to live a good life, and particularly, what is it means to live life as a free citizen of the republic. In other words, education for Plato is tied to the good life, and the good life is tied to life in the polis, to civic life. One of the central questions of the Republic is how best to prepare the young for that life.
In Roman times, this incipient curriculum was slowly systematized into seven disciplines divided into the two categories known as the trivium, consisting of the verbal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, consisting of the numerical arts of mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. These were also known as the seven pillars of wisdom, because they were understood as the foundation for future learning, and they are also the basis of the liberal arts. It is important to remember that the phrase liberal arts, literally, “free arts,” does not mean a mish-mash of subjects. It does not mean simply being free to take whatever you want. It means rather those arts necessary for the free citizen, but also, the leisure or freedom to pursue them. It is an irony of our own high-pressure environment that the word “school” deriving from the Greek word for “school,” goes back to the word scholia, which means leisure. This thumbnail history underscores two things: The first is that the liberal arts are about the formation of the person. It is an intellectual formation but with practical purposes, that is, with the purpose of leading the young to live good lives as citizens within a civic sphere. And the liberal arts do their formative work in the context of leisure. We do not have such leisure, of course, unless we are free from other distractions, such as the conquests by others that might enslave us, or economic and social constraints that might do so in more subtle but equally powerful ways.
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