To the Yale College community, 

We are approaching the middle of the spring term at a time when national forces have buffeted higher education. As we look ahead to the coming weeks and months, I want to reaffirm that despite uncertainties about federal funding and legislation, Yale College remains committed to its educational mission and to building a community that welcomes all our students, faculty, and staff.

Fifteen months have passed since Yale College released its strategic plan — the result of a college-wide effort to preserve and strengthen Yale's excellence in undergraduate education. In that short time, the plan has seen extraordinary progress in all four of the areas it identified for development: educational opportunity, curricular innovation, community of learning, and shared mission. Although important work remains, the faculty, students, and staff who have been working on the plan have made significant strides bringing it to life. I write today with highlights of the community’s accomplishments so far and urge you to learn more by reading a more detailed account.

Educational opportunity, the first of the plan’s four pillars, made recent headlines when Provost Scott Strobel and I announced that Yale College would be enrolling 100 more students in each entering class and making investments to support this expansion. The growth comes as part of a broader effort to expand access to a Yale College education, which has included increasing — to 25% — the percentage of students eligible for Pell grants. It also comes as Yale College has invested in welcoming and supporting all students, starting from the time they apply to Yale College until after they graduate. Initiatives like summer advising and weekly guidance for incoming students, the creation of the Office of Educational Opportunity, and expansions at the Office of Career Strategy have sharply increased the number of opportunities at and beyond Yale.

Curricular innovation, the plan's second pillar, has also seen important gains in the past year and a half. New certificate programs in data science, ethnography, food studies, human rights, and quantum science and engineering address areas of rising global importance and respond to students’ interest in opportunities for interdisciplinary exploration. Many courses now incorporate experiential learning, artificial intelligence, and intensive writing. The six undergraduate engineering majors have laid groundwork for Yale to ensure its leadership in engineering education.

Yale College's community of learning, the third pillar, has likewise received significant attention, given the centrality of the residential experience to our educational mission. The 14 colleges have been studying and developing longstanding roles of fellows, advisers, and graduate affiliates. Yale College has also reformed housing practices to take full advantage of the recently created housing office and ease housing for rising juniors. Beyond the colleges, new programming, starting with newly reimagined orientation, invites students to explore the values of a liberal education, expose themselves to a broad range of views, and sustain productive dialogue across lines of disagreement. To this end, I invite you to learn more about my dean’s dialogue tomorrow.

The plan's final pillar, Yale College's shared mission, focuses on strengthening the communities and resources that support students. Initiatives here include new direct fundraising opportunities for student organizations, improved meal coverage during recesses for low-income students, and enhanced training and programming for all Yale College staff. They also include reduced SafetyNet response times for emergency student funding and greatly expanded communications and digital resources that include social media engagement, staff podcasts, and newsletters to Yale College's audiences.

I thank the many members of the community who have devoted their time and efforts to advancing Yale College's strategic plan. I also thank President McInnis for her support; since she was named president last year, she has held over a hundred listening sessions for students, staff, and faculty to share their views. From those conversations, undergraduate experience emerged as one of the top themes, and we will use the insights from these and future conversations to inform this important work in the future.

Sincerely, 

Pericles Lewis 
Dean of Yale College 
Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature 
Professor of English