Yale University is a private university without a religious affiliation, meaning that the school acts as a private entity and does not receive funding from tax-based programs or religious organizations. Since Yale is a private university and does not benefit from state subsidies, its tuition is higher than a state-funded school. For the 2011-2012 school year the university's tuition is $40,500, placing it among the most expensive colleges in the nation. Yale does offer need-blind admissions and the school helps offset the high costs by delving into its $16.5 billion endowment, the second largest of any university in the country. Over half of the school's undergraduate population receives some sort of financial aid and the school meets 100% of all demonstrated financial need.
There are a few popular misunderstandings about the term "Ivy League." People often use the term to describe any private college that is considered elite, but the Ivy League is actually a formal coalition of colleges, all of which are highly regarded for their academics. The Ivy League was founded in 1954 as an athletic conference comprised of eight schools with similar academic and social ideologies. Yale, Harvard and Princeton are referred to as "The Big Three," while the rest of the conference is comprised of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and University of Pennsylvania. People often refer to MIT, Stanford and Duke as "Ivy League," but they are not actually part of the Ivy League despite their heralded academics.
Yale is what "US News & World Report" and other publications refer to as a comprehensive national university, meaning that the school offers a full range of bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs with a heavy emphasis on groundbreaking research. National universities are different than liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore due to the fact that liberal arts colleges focus primarily on undergraduate liberal arts education.
Britain's Oxford and Cambridge universities developed the residential college system. This system creates a fully engaged academic and social environment for undergraduate students in which students are enrolled in various sub-colleges within the university and these sub-colleges shape their entire college experience. A resident professor lives among the students of each residential college, where the students eat together and share common bonds meant to instill pride in that particular college.