Particularly well-known are the undergraduate school, Yale College; the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and the Yale Law School. Yale Law School, for example, has been ranked number 1 by U.S. News & World Report every year since the ranking's inception. In 1861, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences became the first U.S. school to award the Ph.D. Also notable is the Yale School of Drama, which has produced many prominent Hollywood and Broadway actors and writers, as well as the art, divinity, forestry and environment, music, medical, management, nursing, and architecture schools.

The university's assets include a $17 billion endowment (the second-largest of any academic institution) and more than a dozen libraries that hold a total of 12.5 million volumes (making it, according to Yale, the world's second-largest university library system). Yale has 3,300 faculty members, who teach 5,300 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate students. Yale is organized as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

Yale's 70 undergraduate majors are primarily focused on a liberal arts curriculum, and few of the undergraduate departments are pre-professional. About 45% of Yale undergraduates major in the arts and humanities, 35% in the social sciences, and 20% in the sciences. All tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.

Yale uses a residential college housing system modeled after those at Oxford and Cambridge. Each residential college houses a representative cross-section of the undergraduate student body and features facilities, seminars, resident faculty and graduate fellows, and support personnel. As of 2009, there are 12 residential colleges, with two more planned. The existing residential colleges are named after past Yale presidents, the early locations of the Yale campus, and historic local figures. The University has not announced names for the new colleges, but has made it clear that they will not be named after living donors.

Yale's graduate programs include those in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — covering 53 disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, biology, physical sciences, and engineering — and those in the Professional Schools of Architecture, Art, Divinity, Drama, Forestry & Environmental Sciences, Law, Management, Medicine, Music, Nursing, and Public Health.

Yale and Harvard have been rivals in almost everything for most of their history, notably academics, rowing, and American football. In sports, The Game and the Harvard-Yale Regatta are annual contests.

Yale President Rick Levin summarized the university's institutional priorities for its fourth century: "First, among the nation's finest research universities, Yale is distinctively committed to excellence in undergraduate education. Second, in our graduate and professional schools, as well as in Yale College, we are committed to the education of leaders.

The nicknames "Elis"(after Elihu Yale) and "Yalies"are often used, both within and outside Yale, to refer to Yale students.