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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
FROM THE FRONT
“Some have argued that the 21st century is the Asian century … What better time to be here?” LILY KONG ACTING EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF YALE-NUS
Admit rate likely to decrease 2000
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ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1 — Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania — have experienced drops in their number of applicants this year, applications to both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University jumped by 1 percent and 7 percent respectively. Harvard and Princeton have yet to release their application numbers. Brenzel said because universities use different recruitment strategies, disparities in the number of total applications do not provide much insight by themselves. “Year-to-year fluctuations in total application counts have little meaning in themselves,” Brenzel said in the email. This admissions cycle represents the first time in four years that Yale, Harvard and Princeton have all offered early admissions policies. Last month, Yale posted the lowest early admissions acceptance rate in the Ivy League, 15.7 percent, even though the number of early applicants decreased 18 percent from last year. With the high overlap of applicants to Yale, Harvard and Princeton, Brenzel has said he anticipated the drop in the number of early applicants, but he said administrators did not know what to expect for Yale’s total application count. “There are simply too many possible causes for application count changes to say what effect
the change in the early admissions landscape had on total applications,” he said. Three college admissions experts and guidance counselors interviewed said they expected the number of Yale’s applications to rise in line with a national rise in college applicants, despite Harvard and Princeton’s early admissions policies this year, and said the trend will likely continue in the future.
The power of the dream is so strong that the numbers don’t convince them to not apply … That’s the human story behind these numbers.
GRAPH YALE APPLICATION COUNTS AND ADMISSIONS RATES 30000
11.4%
1.2 1.0 0.8
9.9%
9.9%
9.7%
25000 8.6%
8.9%
7.9% 7.7%
7.5% 20000
JON REIDER College guidance counselor, San Francisco University High School Jon Reider, a college guidance counselor at San Francisco University High School and a former admissions officer at Stanford, said Yale’s growth in applicants is “perfectly normal.” He added that he thinks a lower admit rate in the spring will entice more admitted student to accept Yale’s offers of admission. “What continues to strike me is the ability of students and families to say, ‘Oh, I know
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how many students Yale usually takes, but I’m going to try to get in anyway,’” Reider said. “The power of the dream is so strong that the numbers don’t convince them to not apply. And that’s the
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human story behind these numbers.” Reider added that the combined influence of “the dream” of attending a top-tier university, the amount of marketing
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conducted by elite schools and the “self-reinforcing frenzy” of the admissions process all make continued application growth at prestigious universities “sustainable.”
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Regular applicants to Yale College will be notified of their decisions in early April. Contact ANDREW GIAMBRONE at andrew.giambrone@yale.edu .
Potential faculty comment on curriculum YALE-NUS FROM PAGE 1 excited by the possibility of starting fresh,” Bailyn said. While Yale-NUS administrators said faculty will be responsible for establishing specifics of the curriculum, the core framework proposed last September will remain in place. All Yale-NUS students will be required to take three or four classes in three different areas of study — the “great works,” the “individual and society,” and the “natural sciences” — during their first two years before focusing on their selected major. Students will have space to take a total of six electives during their freshman and sophomore years. Bailyn said a defined curriculum will help students form a coherent, well-rounded course of study — something that is not as significant a concern at Yale College, where students already recognize the value of a liberal arts program. “One of the challenges of the distributional requirement system at Yale, which works well for a large and diverse university, is to some extent people take the distribution requirements, sometimes, just to fulfill a requirement,” said Pericles Lewis, a Yale English professor who is chairing the University’s humanities faculty search committee. While administrators have previously said Yale-NUS could serve as a testing ground for new aca-
demic programs at Yale, University President Richard Levin said Tuesday that it was “very unlikely” that a core curriculum like the one at YaleNUS would be implemented in New Haven. If anything, he said, some of the core classes taught in Singapore may be brought back to New Haven. Faculty committees at Yale and NUS had already agreed on broad principles of the Yale-NUS curriculum when Levin and NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan formally announced the college in April 2011. Over last summer, faculty search committees developed those principles into the framework they released in September. University Secretary Linda Lorimer said Yale and NUS invited professors from universities such as Princeton and Duke, along with liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and on the West Coast, to critique the curriculum. Based on feedback from these educators, Bailyn said administrators decided to reduce the number of courses Yale-NUS students will take each semester from five to four to allow students to study material in more depth. Many of the core classes in the humanities and social sciences at Yale-NUS will incorporate both Asian and Western traditions, according to the proposed syllabus. “Literature and Humanities I,” a class listed under the “great works” discipline in a sample syllabus,
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YA L E - N U S R E C E I V E S NEW FUNDING
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan discusses the new college with NUS faculty. would study many of the same works as Yale’s Directed Studies, including Homer’s “Odyssey” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” But the class will also examine Eastern literature such as Lao Tzu’s “Dao De Jin” and the “Fire Sermon” of the Buddha. Administrators plan to hire 50 fac-
ulty members by the time Yale-NUS opens in fall 2013. Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu and TAPLEY STEPHENSON at preston.stephenson@yale.edu .
A $9.3 million donation to Yale-NUS will fund two professorships, a fellowship and financial aid at the new college, the University announced in a Tuesday press release. The Singaporean government has pledged to match the gift with additional funding for the National University of Singapore and YaleNUS, and will contribute almost $30 million to those programs. The donation was made by multiple Singaporean companies in honor of the nation’s prominent businessman J.Y. Pillay, and Yale announced Tuesday that Sir Peter Crane, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, will be the first J.Y. Pillay Distinguished Visiting Professor at YaleNUS. “I see this as an ideal opportunity to contribute to the further development of Yale-NUS College, while also building on the already strong connections that exist between the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale and the expanding environmental programs at NUS,” Crane said in Yale press release. Yale-NUS administrators announced plans for two new joint-degree programs in December, including a fifth-year master’s in environmental studies program through the environment school. The gift will also fund the J.Y. Pillay Comparative Asia Research Center at the NUS Global Asia Institute, which will study “cross-disciplinary research on issues relevant to China, India and Indonesia,” according to a Tuesday press release from NUS. —Tapley Stephenson