Capital campaign beats $7 billion goal

Alex Eben Meyer

View full image

Yale’s eight-year fundraising drive, For Humanity, closed June 30 after raising more than $7 billion from about 99,000 donors—the largest sum in the university’s history—with nearly $2 billion of it earmarked for student aid. 

Launched in 2018 by then-president Peter Salovey ’86PhD and closed under his successor, Maurie McInnis ’96PhD, the campaign asked donors, “What are you for?” It exceeded its $7-billion goal by $460 million. The money is being split across four areas: collaborative research and innovation ($2.11 billion); student support ($1.99 billion); scientific research ($1.77 billion); and the arts and humanities ($1.29 billion). 

The campaign paid for the Jackson School of Global Affairs, the first new degree-granting school at Yale in 46 years. It also funded 238 new scholarship funds, capped debt for qualifying students at the medical school at $10,000, made the David Geffen School of Drama tuition-free, and set up the Hurst Horizon Scholarship, which covers tuition for one in eight law students.

A further $374 million went to undergraduate scholarships, feeding into a broader aid overhaul: This year, Yale began waiving tuition for families earning under $200,000 and covering full cost of attendance for those under $100,000.

The money also built things. The Living Village added sustainable student housing at the Divinity School. The Yale Peabody Museum underwent a major renovation and expansion and now offers free admission to all visitors. The Schwarzman Center transformed Commons and Memorial Hall into an expanded dining and arts hub. The Hall of Graduate Studies was rebuilt into the Humanities Quadrangle, gaining 13,000 square feet underground and now housing 18 humanities departments under one roof—a scale of investment in the humanities no other American university has matched, says Kathryn Lofton, who was dean of humanities when the project was underway.

At 100 College Street, near the School of Medicine, the campaign built the Wu Tsai Institute, pulling neuroscience and cognition researchers across Yale—from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Schools of Medicine, Engineering, and more—into one building. Organized around three centers covering development, computation, and cognition and behavior, it now counts more than 200 faculty members and 60 laboratories, along with new imaging and computing facilities including BrainWorks, NeuroLux, and The Matrix. Founding director Nick Turk-Browne says the aim is to bring biology, psychology, and computation to bear on one question: What makes us human?

Support work for students grew, too. The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, which coaches first-generation and low-income students through the Office of Educational Opportunity, logged 4,852 student contacts in 2024–25. Those encompassed help with navigating large lecture courses, managing time, and peer mentoring, says Jennifer Frederick ’99PhD, the center’s founding executive director. The Poorvu Center opened a second site, Poorvu North, in Kline Tower this year, to reach students on Science Hill.

Jay Simms ’27, a senior double-majoring in neuroscience and chemistry, is one beneficiary. Yale’s need-based aid policy is why his family could consider the university at all, he said. He now mentors other first-generation, low-income students through the same office that once supported him.

Provost Scott Strobel called the campaign a launchpad for work that will outlast it. Researchers are collaborating across disciplines, and students who once could not have afforded Yale now attend it. Campaign cochairs Randy Nelson ’85 and Nancy Marx Better ’84 credit the scale of the result to the breadth of alumni who gave, not just the size of any single gift, calling it a case of one generation of Yale graduates shaping the university for the next.