By the time he was in middle school, Jay Simms knew he wanted to attend an Ivy League university, something very few people even considered in his hometown of Fayetteville, Tenn.
He strove for academic excellence in the classroom throughout middle and high school; when it came time to apply for college, his mother took on the task of figuring out how the family might afford such an education. She pointed him toward Yale after she learned that the university’s financial aid program meets 100% of demonstrated need.
“That was really what motivated me to apply,” said Simms, now a senior at Yale. “And that’s one of the big reasons why I’m able to be here.”
Jay Simms
A pre-med student double-majoring in neuroscience and chemistry, Simms said he is so grateful for the support he has received as a first-generation, low-income student at Yale that he spends much of his free time helping similar students as a mentor in the Office of Educational Opportunity and the STARS I program for STEM students.
“All of my mentors, collectively at Yale and before, have motivated me to provide the best mentorship skills that I can to the incoming students,” Simms said. “One of the things Yale does really well is helping you adjust to the social and academic environment, as well as providing financial support.”
Making a Yale education accessible to promising scholars like Simms, regardless of their financial means, was one of the chief aims of “For Humanity,” the most ambitious fund-raising campaign in the university’s history. The comprehensive 10-year campaign, which concluded on June 30, raised more than $7 billion from some 99,000 donors; nearly $2 billion of that total went toward student financial assistance.
The overarching goal of the campaign, initiated by former president Peter Salovey and concluded under current President Maurie McInnis, was to raise money for strategic investments that will provide faculty and students with the support and resources necessary to tackle some of the most important challenges facing humankind.
The ‘For Humanity’ campaign was built on the conviction that the questions most worth asking are often the hardest to answer, and that meeting complexity requires people and disciplines moving toward one another.
Priority areas were the arts and humanities ($1.29 billion), scientific research ($1.77 billion), collaborative research and innovation initiatives ($2.11 billion), and student support ($1.99 billion).
Support from the campaign has manifested across campus. In addition to the Jackson School of Global Affairs — the first new degree-granting school at Yale in 46 years — it has funded an extensive array of institutes, programs, facilities, and ventures, including those related to medical research, climate study, entrepreneurial innovation, arts programming, engineering, global studies, teaching and learning support, and accessibility to Yale for both potential students and the public at large.
Yale Peabody Museum
“The ‘For Humanity’ campaign was built on the conviction that the questions most worth asking are often the hardest to answer, and that meeting complexity requires people and disciplines moving toward one another,” said McInnis. “Because this community came together to fulfill that imperative with such generosity of spirit, Yale is in a better position to expand access and opportunity, advance discovery across fields, and bring knowledge to bear on the challenges that demand both imagination and resolve.”
“More than a decade ago, we set out to advance Yale’s historic strengths while investing in areas where a truly world-leading university must excel,” said Scott Strobel, Yale’s provost and the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. “This vision was always rooted in supporting the people who make this university extraordinary, and in our shared belief that knowledge, pursued with rigor and purpose, can change the world.”
Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
Elevating academic excellence
Not only does the campaign make possible financial support for talented students, but it also allows Yale to provide high-quality academic support once they’re here. Investments in student financial support included the creation of 238 new scholarship funds, capping student debt at Yale School of Medicine at $10,000 for qualified students, making David Geffen School of Drama at Yale tuition free, and establishing the Hurst Horizon Scholarship Program, which provides free tuition for one of every eight Yale Law School students.
The campaign also raised $374 million for undergraduate scholarships, ensuring that the promise of access and opportunity can be kept for students for generations to come. Thanks in part to this effort, Yale College announced in January 2026 a significant enhancement to its financial aid program. Beginning this year, Yale offers free tuition to families with incomes below $200,000 and covers all costs of attendance for families with incomes below $100,000.
At the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, which provides support for students and faculty across the university, “For Humanity” allowed for the expansion of student services in the Office for Educational Opportunity (OEO), which it runs jointly with the Yale College dean’s office.
We have invested in staff and space and resources to help people do their best teaching and do their best learning.
The Poorvu office provides “a whole suite of academic and co-curricular services” for first-generation and low-income students, said Jennifer Frederick, associate provost for academic initiatives and the founding executive director of Poorvu. Those services help students navigate academia, providing guidance, for example, on how to succeed in large lecture courses, and how to manage their time, she said. Students also have access to peer coaches, peer mentors, and small-group mentoring.
The services are well utilized: in 2024–25, the OEO recorded 4,852 student contacts, including attendance at events, workshops, peer group meetings, and one-to-one consultations.
Poorvu, which is located in the lower level of Sterling Memorial Library, was also able to add a satellite location, Poorvu North, in the base of Kline Tower this year. The additional location in the heart of Science Hill provides a convenient space for group studies and tutoring sessions for students who spend a lot of time on that side of campus, Frederick said.
“Yale has always prided itself on its educational excellence,” Frederick said. “Having a teaching and learning center provides a campus hub as well as a community signal that this is something that we care about. We have invested in staff and space and resources to help people do their best teaching and do their best learning.”
Making space for collaboration
The campaign also facilitated dynamic new physical additions to campus, including the Living Village, a sustainable student-housing complex at Yale Divinity School, an extensive renovation and expansion of the Yale Peabody Museum, which also made admission to one of the nation’s oldest natural history collections free, and Yale Schwarzman Center, a center for dining, the arts, and a wide array of free programming open to the broader New Haven community.
Living Village
It also provided a physical home that unified Yale’s humanities departments — the new Humanities Quadrangle located in the center of campus — reinforcing the university’s longstanding commitment to and strength in them. Formerly the Hall of Graduate Studies, the Gothic-style building was redesigned and refurbished to accommodate 18 departments in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences under one roof, inviting collaboration and conversation across academic disciplines.
“There is no other American university that invested this many millions into an infrastructure for humanities teaching, programming, and research,” said Kathryn Lofton, the Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, and the dean of humanities at the time of the quadrangle’s construction. “Since the beginning of Yale, its students have studied literature, philosophy, classics, history, and religion. Humanities subjects continue to this day to be areas of superlative Yale academic achievement.”
Humanities Quadrangle
The redesign of the 14-story building increased its size by 13,000 square feet, all underground. In addition to departmental offices, the quadrangle houses classrooms, meeting spaces, a lecture hall, film-screening studio, lounge areas, and study spaces, as well as the Whitney Humanities Center.
Of particular grandeur is Swensen Tower, Lofton noted, which, in being wholly devoted to doctoral student study areas, “becomes a promissory commitment for the future, where humanities area research and teaching continue,” she said.
Another transformational addition is the Wu Tsai Institute, a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research hub at 100 College Street that connects faculty and students exploring neuroscience and cognition across the Yale campus.
Under the direction of Yale psychologist and inaugural director Nick Turk-Browne, the institute has launched an ecosystem of researchers striving to better understand and unlock the potential of human cognition by bridging the psychological, biological, and computational sciences.
Wu Tsai Institute
“Our mission statement is to understand human cognition and explore human potential by sparking interdisciplinary inquiry,” Turk-Browne said. “We have forged collaborations and rolled out initiatives across campus that bring fresh perspectives to big questions, most fundamentally, what makes us human.”
The institute includes three academic centers — addressing development and plasticity, cognition and behavior, and computation and machine intelligence — and houses more than 60 labs. Its community of world-class researchers includes more than 200 faculty who are members of the institute, among them former president Salovey, a psychologist, along with hundreds of students, postdocs, and staff members.
There’s a tremendous amount of new scientific discovery and activity happening as a result of the institute bringing together this community and providing them with advanced equipment and new technologies that they didn’t have access to before.
Previously, faculty and researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale School of Medicine, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences who studied the brain were spread across campus. The Wu Tsai Institute’s purpose-built space brings them together, connecting those studying the brain at the level of neurons, circuits, and synapses to those investigating cognition, behavior, and society — unlocking the potential for new discoveries.
And its core facilities have made available new tools and resources for Yale scientists to undertake boundary-pushing research: BrainWorks, a brain-imaging facility with state-of-the-art equipment for non-invasive study of human brain function; NeuroLux and The Plexus, for imaging molecules and cells in the nervous system; and The Matrix, for high-performance computing, experimental hardware, and data visualization.
BrainWorks
“There’s a tremendous amount of new scientific discovery and activity happening as a result of the institute bringing together this community and providing them with advanced equipment and new technologies that they didn’t have access to before,” Turk-Browne said.
While the “For Humanity” campaign has now closed, Strobel noted, its impact as a “launchpad” for the university’s work continues. “With the campaign’s support, researchers and scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are collaborating to make remarkable discoveries. Exceptional students have greater access to a Yale education, regardless of their backgrounds. Our entire campus is fueled with momentum to meet the defining challenges of our time.
“I’m immensely grateful to all who supported this effort — the alumni and friends who have chosen to invest in Yale’s mission, and the faculty, students, and staff who, day in and day out, advance it.”
Indeed, said campaign c0-chair Randy Nelson ’85, the Yale community came together for the campaign “in a remarkable and consequential way. Beyond the extraordinary amount raised and what it will make possible, one of the campaign’s greatest achievements was the breadth of commitment behind it.”
The campaign offered a view into “what stewardship means at Yale,” added fellow campaign c0-chair Nancy Marx Better ’84: “Each generation inheriting a university shaped by those before, and accepting responsibility for strengthening it for those who follow.”
