Science Careers Blog

Yale University announced last week that it plans to dig into its own pockets to expand its support for biomedical research, increase financial aid for students, and make more of its collections available to the public without charge. To fund these initiatives, Yale president Richard C. Levin said the institution will boost the payout from its endowment to $1.15 billion in 2008-2009, up from $843 million this year.

According to the announcement, Yale plans a "major expansion" of its biomedical research capabilities, which includes establishing several new research institutes, although the university did not identify the specific research fields of these new institutes. In October, Yale purchased a 136-acre research campus from Bayer Pharmaceutical Company in nearby West Haven, Connecticut. The new institutes are expected to be housed at this location.

Yale announced this week the details of its support for student financial aid, which also comes out of its increased endowment payout. Families with incomes below $120,000 per year will see the amounts they need to pay for Yale tuition cut by at least half, while families with incomes between $120,000 and $200,000 will get their costs reduced by a third.  Families with incomes between $60,000 and $120,000 will pay between 1 and 10% of total family income, and those with incomes of less than $60,000 will not need to make any contribution. In December, Harvard and several other elite universities announced a similar program of financial aid.

The university also plans to use its endowment to expand access to what it calls its "intellectual treasury" by digitizing its collections and making them available to the public free of charge. In a similar action, Yale announced last month its Open Courses, where lectures and materials from seven of its undergraduate courses, including those in astronomy, physics, and psychology, are made available to the public in digitized form.

Levin said Yale's endowment experienced "exceptionally strong investment returns in recent years," which made possible increasing the payout this year.