Yale was initially founded as a Protestant institution, and has gradually welcomed a wider range of faiths and spiritual views over time.
The following data is collated from the archives of university and chaplain’s office records over more than ninety years. While it gives a useful big picture of how Yale has changed, the methods of collecting data have varied hugely over time, and there are many years we are missing data for or where the way in which it was collected skews our understanding of it. We have done our best to explain at each stage what data may be challenging to interpret, as well as pointing out notable firsts in the Yale College student body. As students increasingly claim multiple religious identities we have made the decision to count each student once (ie if a student identifies as Methodist and Muslim they would be counted as a 1/2 person in each category). This is an imperfect system but we hope shows you the extent of religious diversity.
While for the first few decades this was based on mandatory survey data, the modern survey that this data is based on has around a 40-50% response rate, and it is likely that it favors students who are religious and under represents agnostic, atheist and other non religious groups.