Since it’s publication in 1983, George Pierson’s A Yale Book of Numbers, Historical Statistics of the College and University 1701 - 1976 has had an appreciative following among a small group of University administrators who valued its comprehensive statistical information related to the history of Yale.  Few people knew about this book.  The World Wide Web provided a perfect opportunity to make this resource more widely available.  The book might be of interest to the broad audience of the Yale community, but it should also be of interest to students regarding the history of higher education in America.

Once it was decided to reproduce and convert the book to the Web as part of the Yale Tercentennial celebration, the obvious question was what to do about the years after 1976 when Pierson’s book ends.  The occasion of the Tercentennial provided the opportunity, the resources and the motivation to create a follow-up volume to bring Pierson’s original book up-to-date.

Beverly Waters, Research Associate in the Office of Institutional Research, began to organize the update in the fall of 1997, and consulted with an advisory group consisting of Linda Lorimer (University Secretary), Charles Long (Deputy Provost), Richard Szary (University Archivist), Janet Ackerman (Associate Vice-President for Finance), John Goldin (Director of Institutional Research), Mort Engstrom (Director of Capital Management), and Douglas Hawthorne (Director of Development Information and Support Services).  Some of George Pierson’s tables are continued in parallel formats in the updated book.  Other tables were discontinued because information in them was not readily available.  Many topics of current interest to us today do not appear at all in Pierson’s original book.  The updated book includes expanded areas of information related to the background of students, including a number of tables on international students, information about women at Yale, and data on the racial diversity of faculty and students.  Thanks to the research of Mort Engstrom, the updated book also contains a great deal of additional information about Yale’s finances, including the period long before 1976.

While George Pierson’s original book does not focus exclusively on undergraduate education, many tables in it single out Yale College or the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  While we made an attempt to include more comprehensive information about Yale’s professional schools, the updated Book of Numbers  continues to have a strong emphasis on Yale College and the Arts and Sciences.  Nonetheless, a great deal of information about the professional schools can be found distributed among a variety of University-wide tables in the updated book.  For example, one of the significant features of the history of Yale after 1976 is the growth in size of the School of Medicine.  One can see signs of that phenomenon in the tables on University finances and on the number of faculty by school, but there are few tables that focus on the School of Medicine specifically.

The information presented in the two volumes tends to concentrate on Yale’s role as educator.  As a result, Yale’s contributions to research and scholarship and activities such as museums, galleries, laboratories, clinics, and scholarly publication are not as well represented.  In our defense, had the Book of Numbers, 1976 – 2000 been designed to be a perfectly comprehensive and encyclopedic compilation of statistics and information about Yale, it is likely that the project would have grown to such a scale that it might never have been completed, or even attempted.

The original book reflected the personal voice and vision of George W. Pierson as the long-serving official historian of Yale, and it was just one of his many contributions to recording the history of Yale.  The texts that accompany the statistical tables in the original book reflect his voice and his unique perspective.  We have not attempted anything similar in the way of explanatory text in the updated volume.  A Yale Book of Numbers, 1976 – 2000 is strictly a compilation of tables, charts, and statistical information about Yale over that twenty-five year period.
 

Everyone in the Office of Institutional Research provided some form of information in the various tables, but I would like to acknowledge the role that Beverly Waters played in overseeing this project.  It is thanks to her persistence and organizational ability that this project was successfully completed.  We would like to thank the members of the advisory committee, the individuals in many offices who provided data for these tables, and the handful of Yale College students (Amie Pena, Joelle Laszlo, Claire Woolston, Will McLemore, John Cook, Scott Proper, and Ronen Givony) who assisted in compiling the data for the tables and editing the rough drafts.   We owe special thanks to Mort Engstrom who used his long experience in the Finance Office to dig into arcane and obscure financial reports in order to create the new financial tables in the updated book. We would also like to thank Rob Laporte and the staff of DISC for their work on creating the digital images for Pierson’s original A Yale Book of Numbers, and for their work in creating a straightforward way to navigate through both the original book and the updated book, both available on the Web.

 John R. Goldin
 Office of Institutional Research
  October, 2001