The Undergraduate Curriculum
Yale College offers a liberal arts education, one that aims to train a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used. Such an approach regards college as a phase of exploration, a place for the exercise of curiosity and the discovery of new interests and abilities, rather than the development of interests fully determined in advance. The College does not primarily train students in the particulars of a given career, although some students may elect to receive more of that preparation than others. Instead, its main goal is to instill in students the development of skills that they can bring to bear in whatever work they eventually choose. This philosophy of education corresponds with that expressed in the Yale Report of 1828, which draws a distinction between the "furniture" and the "discipline" of the mind. Acquiring facts is important, but learning how to think in a variety of ways takes precedence.
To ensure that study is neither too narrowly focused nor too diffuse, the College stands behind the principle of distribution of studies as strongly as it supports the principle of concentration. It requires that study be characterized, particularly in the earlier years, by a reasonable diversity of subject matter and approach, and in the later years by concentration in one of the major programs or departments. In addition, the College requires that all students in the Class of 2009 and subsequent classes take courses in certain foundational skills—writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language. These skills hold the key to many things students will want to know and do in later study and later life. People who fail to develop them at an early stage are limiting their futures without knowing what opportunities they are eliminating. In each of the three skills, students are required to travel some further distance from where they were in high school for the reason that these competences mature and deepen. The best high school writer is still not the writer he or she could be; students who do not use their mathematics or foreign language skills in college commonly lose abilities they once had, and can graduate knowing less than when they arrived.
The academic study of the international world and firsthand experience of foreign cultures are crucial for citizens of the global future. No Yale College student can afford to remain ignorant of the forces that shape our increasingly transnational world. Yale College urges all of its students to consider a summer or a term abroad sometime during their college careers.
A student working toward a bachelor's degree takes four or five courses each term, and normally receives the B.A. or B.S. degree after completing thirty-six term courses or their equivalent in eight terms of enrollment. To balance structure with latitude, and to achieve a balance of breadth and depth, a candidate for the bachelor's degree is required, in completing the thirty-six term courses, to fulfill the distributional requirements described in this chapter as well as the requirements of a major program.
What students ultimately derive from four years of study at Yale depends in large measure on their careful planning of a program of study. It would be impossible, and surely imprudent, for students to attempt to map out at the beginning of their studies a firm schedule of courses for the next eight terms. Yet it is important for students to think ahead, and always to plan while keeping in mind the principles outlined above.
Rather than prescribing a program of study, Yale College expects students to choose their courses, believing that students who select their courses are inevitably more engaged in them—a first precondition for serious learning—than students who have their program of study chosen by others. In shaping their educational goals, students should seek informed advice. The best advising comes when students and faculty members develop relationships out of shared intellectual interests. Because incoming students have not yet formed such relationships, Yale College has a special constellation of advising in place for them during their first days of school. The residential college dean connects freshmen with available advising resources, including presentations by faculty representatives from academic departments and by the Health Professions Advisory Board, by Undergraduate Career Services, and by International Education and Fellowship Programs. Incoming students also confer with individual advisers, assigned to them by their residential college dean, who can listen to their interests, aims, and concerns and offer them general guidance. No adviser will prescribe a particular set of courses, and the responsibility for shaping a program is the student's, but each student should make use of all the advice available in order to plan the most effective program.
