page_title: Yale College
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Yale College / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Elihu Yale Memorial, St. Mary's Church, Madras
context_page_description: Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, when its schools were confederated and the institution was renamed Yale University. It is one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States.
  Originally established to train Congregationalist ministers, the college began teaching humanities and natural sciences by the late 18th century. At the same time, students began organizing extracurricular organizations: first literary societies, and later publications, sports teams, and singing groups. By the middle of the 19th century, it was the largest college in the United States. In 1847, it was joined by another undergraduate school at Yale, the Sheffield Scientific School, which was absorbed into the college in 1956.
context_section_description: The Collegiate School was founded in 1701 by a charter drawn by ten Congregationalist ministers led by James Pierpont and approved by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut. Originally situated in Abraham Pierson's home in Killingworth, Connecticut, the college moved to New Haven in 1718 and was renamed for Elihu Yale, an early benefactor, merchant, and slave-trader. Founded as a school to train ministers, original curriculum included only coursework in theology and sacred languages. Although early faculty, including Jonathan Edwards and Elisha Williams, maintained strict Congregational orthodoxy, by the time of the American Revolution subsequent rectors, especially Ezra Stiles, relaxed the curriculum to include humanities and limited natural science education.
  Scientific courses introduced by chemist Benjamin Silliman in 1801 made the college an early hub of scientific education, a curriculum which was grafted into Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1847. As in many of Yale's sister institutions, debates about the expansiveness of the undergraduate curriculum were waged throughout the early 19th century, with statements like the Yale Report of 1828 re-asserting Yale's conservative theological heritage and faculty. Later in the century, William Graham Sumner, the first professor of sociology in the United States, introduced studies in the social sciences. These expanding fields of study were integrated with graduate schools of the university and amalgamated into a course of liberal arts education, which presaged the advent of divisional majors in the twentieth century.
  The relaxation of curriculum came with expansion of the extracurriculum. Student literary societies emerged as early as 1750, singing groups and student publications in the early 1800s, fraternities and secret societies in the mid-nineteenth century, and intercollegiate athletics by the century's end. Participation and leadership in these groups was an important social signifier and a route to induction into prestigious senior societies. Thus extracurricular participation became central to student life and social advancement, an ethos that became a template for collegiate life across the United States.
  By 1870, Yale was the largest undergraduate institution in the country. The growth of the student body prompted major growth in the college's physical campus, the greatest expansion of which occurred in 1933, when a gift of Edward S. Harkness created and endowed eight residential colleges. Modeled after the college system of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the colleges were intended to be the social and residential centers of undergraduate life while leaving academic programs under the oversight of university's departments. Two additional colleges were built by 1940, and two more in the 1960s.
caption: Elihu Yale Memorial, St. Mary's Church, Madras
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