Yale Drama School opened in fall 1925, as a contemporary New York Times Magazine article reported, with an impressive “million-dollar endowment.”
In 2021, film and music producer David Geffen donated $150 million to eliminate the school’s tuition in perpetuity.
Other major changes since 1925 include the school’s selectivity and demographics. As the journalist H.I. Brock wrote in 1925:
Coming from all over the country, there have been some 150 applicants for the courses offered this year. Of these roughly one-half have been admitted, so that the enrollment of the department is about seventy.
If the original acceptance rate was around 50%, today it’s closer to 5%.
As Brock also wrote in 1925, about the school’s gender split:
The ideal had been that the number of men ought to be about twice as great as the number of women. The present enrollment is approximately 60% men and 40% women.
In the past decade, Yale Drama School enrollment has consistently hovered around 55% female.
Among the school’s notable alumni: Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett, Paul Giamatti, Frances McDormand, Lupita Nyong’o, Sigourney Weaver, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Yale Plans to Establish the Complete Theatre: With Elaborate Equipment at His Disposal, Professor Baker Hopes to Develop All Phases of Dramatic Art
Published: Sunday, November 15, 1925