Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the world. The school's lineup of professors, academic innovation, curriculum and venue facilities are first-class. In addition to graduate programs, Yale also places a strong emphasis on undergraduate education. It has always been at the top of the rankings of various universities.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England.

The strongest disciplines at Yale are social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. The Yale Graduate School of Management created a unique course in 1978, the Public & Private Management course, which focuses on professional management training in public and non-profit organizations. Sixty percent of the course schedules are lectures, 40 percent are case studies, and half of the latter are case studies from public or non-profit institutions. Yale University's MBA is not called MBA but MPPM, and its origin is also here.

In the 2006 World University Rankings of The Times Post-Secondary Education Supplement, Yale University ranked fourth in the world in terms of overall average. In 2006, the Princeton Review ranked Yale University as the second most difficult university in the United States to get into. Yale University is most famous for humanities, arts, history, and law, while science and engineering are relatively weak among the top universities in the United States.