UCI’s Growing Pains Double … and Triple

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Yale University President Richard Levin stated his support for an estimated $600 million expansion to build two on-campus undergraduate residential colleges. Each residential college will measure approximately 235,000 square feet, house approximately 400 students and have all the amenities of the campus’s other residential colleges, including dining halls, common rooms, courtyards, masters’ houses and student suites.
After reviewing the ramifications of building two additional residential colleges on Saturday, the Yale Corporation asked the administration to develop capital and operating budgets and detail a fundraising strategy. The Yale Corporation will vote on whether to build the two residential colleges in June.
The goal of building the two undergraduate residential houses is to accommodate the increasing number of students who apply to Yale, are eligible for admissions but are declined acceptance due to limited housing. According to Levin, hundreds of students who would have been accepted into Yale a decade ago are declined admission each year.
The number of applicants continues to increase year after year. In the past, applications usually ranged from 9,000 to 13,000. However, Yale currently has 22,500 applicants, with less than 10 percent granted acceptance. This number is lower than its traditional admissions rate of 18 to 27 percent from 1969 to 2000.
‘Today, we have a long queue of highly qualified applicants who would collectively allow Yale to make an even greater contribution to society if more could be educated here,’ Levin wrote last week.
The two residential colleges would allow Yale to accommodate a 13-percent increase in undergraduate admissions. This would raise the undergraduate population from 5,300 to approximately 6,000. Yale’s hope of building additional housing for its growing population is noteworthy, particularly for our campus. Housing at UC Irvine plays a critical role in realizing enrollment goals.
For the 2007-2008 academic year, UCI had 39,956 freshmen applicants

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