We convene a committee of experienced admissions officers, Yale faculty, and Yale deans to select applicants who have shown exceptional engagement, ability, and promise.
As with every document in the application, we read essays very carefully and try to get a full sense of the human being behind them. If an essay doesn’t sound like the person who writes it, it cannot serve very well as a personal statement. What is most important is that you write in your own voice. We encourage you to take the writing of the essays seriously and to write openly and honestly about activities, interests, or experiences that have been meaningful to you. The Yale application tries to get at the personal side of the applicant through the use of several short essays whose scope is broad enough to accommodate most writers. Your counselor can help us assess the degree of difficulty of your program, tell us what a particular leadership position means at your school, provide information on your background, and, in general, provide the sort of textured comments about you that would help your application come to life. Just as teacher recommendations are meant to give the admissions committee a glimpse of what you are like in the classroom, the counselor recommendation may provide us with a picture of your place in your high school class and in the larger school community. We wish you all the best and look forward to reading your application. Here are a few tips that we hope will help you present yourself as the outstanding person you no doubt are. Ask the teachers who really know you to recommend you. Our advice is to pursue what you love and tell us about that.
The good news in that is that when so many little things figure into an admissions decision, it is fruitless to worry too much about any one of them. So what matters most in your application? Ultimately, everything matters.
The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor. We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. Visit to learn more.Īs we carefully and respectfully review every application, two questions guide our admissions team: “Who is likely to make the most of Yale’s resources?” and “Who will contribute most significantly to the Yale community?” Today, Yale is proudly inclusive of students of all backgrounds and identities. In 1969, he oversaw the college’s transition to coeducation. * When President Brewster wrote this in 1967, Yale College was a single-gender institution. We are looking for students we can help to become the leaders of their generation in whatever they wish to pursue. Decade after decade, Yalies have set out to make our world better. He said, “We have to make the hunchy judgment as to whether or not with Yale’s help the candidate is likely to be a leader in whatever he* ends up doing.” Our goals remain the same today. Many years ago, former Yale President Kingman Brewster wrote that selecting future Yale students was a combination of looking for those who would make the most of the extraordinary resources assembled here, those with a zest to stretch the limits of their talents, and those with an outstanding public motivation – in other words, applicants with a concern for something larger than themselves.