Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It traces its origins to 1701, when Congregationalist ministers of the Connecticut Colony secured legislative authorisation for a Collegiate School intended to train clergy and civic leaders. After early years in Killingworth and Saybrook, the school settled in New Haven in 1716 and was renamed Yale College in 1718, acknowledging a donation from the merchant Elihu Yale. A curriculum initially centred on theology and sacred languages broadened toward the humanities and sciences over the eighteenth century. Graduate and professional instruction followed in the nineteenth, the first doctorate awarded in the United States being conferred here in 1861, and the institution reorganised as a university in 1887. Yale belongs to the Ivy League and is one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.

Teaching is distributed across fifteen constituent schools. Undergraduates enrol in Yale College, which offers a liberal arts programme organised around departmental majors; advanced study takes place chiefly in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, alongside professional faculties in fields such as law, medicine, management, divinity and drama. The Yale Corporation governs the institution, while each school's faculty sets its own curricula and degree requirements. Enrolment in autumn 2024 stood at about 15,490, comprising roughly 6,740 undergraduates and 8,750 graduate and professional students, taught by a reported faculty of some 5,744.

Research activity spans the sciences, medicine, the social sciences and the humanities, and the university is a founding member of the Association of American Universities. Its library system holds more than 15 million volumes and ranks among the largest academic collections in the country. The campus covers roughly 1,015 acres in and around downtown New Haven, with athletic grounds west of the city, a further site in West Haven, and woodland reserves elsewhere in New England. Undergraduate life is organised through residential colleges, each combining accommodation and dining with its own resident academic leadership.