Yale Plans to Establish the Complete Theatre
With Elaborate Equipment at His Disposal, Professor Baker Hopes to Develop All Phases of Dramatic Art
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