50 free Yale University trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Yale University trivia for alumni, applicants, Ivy League rivals and anyone who has walked past Harkness Tower and wondered why the stone looks so old. The quiz starts in 1701 with the Collegiate School, the ten ministers who donated books, the moves from Killingworth to Saybrook to New Haven, and the East India Company man whose nine bales of goods bought the naming rights. From there it covers the firsts and the oddities: the first PhD in America, the freshman Hebrew requirement behind the seal, the year women finally arrived as undergraduates, and the acid-splashed Collegiate Gothic buildings designed to look centuries older than they are. Then the campus icons: the marble-walled Beinecke and its Gutenberg Bible, the Peabody's Brontosaurus, the Yale Bowl, Cole Porter's fight song, Handsome Dan the bulldog, the Whiffenpoofs, Skull and Bones and the other tombs. Later rounds turn to Yale Law School, the presidents and justices it produced, the Harvard game that ended 29-29, and the college renamed for Grace Hopper. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Harvard, Ivy League and college trivia quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Yale University is located in which city?
New Haven
The town outbid several rivals in 1716 for the right to host the young college, which had started in Killingworth and moved to Saybrook.
Q 02In what year was Yale founded, making it the third-oldest US institution of higher education?
1701
Only Harvard (1636) and William & Mary (1693) are older; it is one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the Revolution.
Q 03Under what name was Yale established in 1701?
the Collegiate School
It was founded by Congregationalist clergy to train ministers and lay leaders, and only became Yale College in 1718.
Q 04Elihu Yale, whose donation earned him naming rights, made his fortune in Madras working for which trading concern?
the East India Company
He was the first president of Fort St George in Madras; his gift of nine bales of goods sold for more than £560.
Q 05Which Boston clergyman suggested the school rename itself 'Yale College' after Elihu Yale's gift?
Cotton Mather
The Mathers had championed the Collegiate School in the hope it would stay more Puritan than Harvard.
Q 06Yale awarded the first of what academic degree in the United States, in 1861?
the PhD
The college organised itself as a university in 1887 and was a founding member of the Association of American Universities.
Q 07Which Yale president, who made all freshmen study Hebrew, put Urim and Thummim on the seal?
Ezra Stiles
Stiles, president from 1778 to 1795, had also helped found Brown University.
Q 08Which Yale graduate serving the British general saved the college when British forces occupied New Haven in 1779?
Edmund Fanning
Yale thanked him with an honorary doctorate of laws in 1803.
Q 09Which 1773 Yale graduate and Revolutionary War spy 'regretted that he had but one life to lose'?
Nathan Hale
He was the archetype of the manly, aristocratic Yale ideal in the early 19th century.
Q 10The Yale Report of 1828 was a dogmatic defence of teaching what?
Latin and Greek
Critics wanted more maths, science and modern languages; the report ensured the classics were not abandoned.
Q 11In what year did Yale first admit women as undergraduates?
1969
A proposed merger with Vassar had fallen through; women had studied in graduate programmes since 1892 and Lucinda Foote passed the entrance exam in 1793 but was rejected.
Q 12Yale discussed merging in 1966 with which women's college to bring in coeducation?
Vassar
The Seven Sisters school tentatively accepted, then declined; both went coed on their own three years later.
Q 13Alexander v. Yale was the first lawsuit to use which law to argue sexual harassment of students is sex discrimination?
Title IX
The plaintiffs lost in court, but the reasoning reshaped discrimination law and led Yale to set up a Grievance Board and Women's Center.
Q 21The Beinecke Library's walls glow when lit from outside. What are they made of?
translucent marble
The Vermont marble was milled thin enough to let light through; Gordon Bunshaft designed the building.
Q 22The Beinecke displays one of the 48 surviving copies of which book?
the Gutenberg Bible
The library's collections also include the mysterious Voynich manuscript.
Q 23The Yale University Library, with more than 15 million volumes, ranks where among US academic libraries?
Third
Its centrepiece is Sterling Memorial Library, which hangs a portrait of the first seven women to earn Yale PhDs in 1894.
Q 14In 2017 Yale renamed Calhoun College after which computing pioneer?
Grace Hopper
John C. Calhoun, the slave-owning vice president, had been on the building since the 1930s.
Q 15Roughly how large was Yale's endowment in fiscal year 2025?
$44 billion
That made it the second-largest of any educational institution, behind Harvard.
Q 16How many Nobel laureates had been affiliated with Yale by October 2025?
72
The tally also includes 5 Fields medallists, 4 Abel laureates and 3 Turing Award winners.
Q 17How many US presidents count as Yale alumni?
Five
Taft, Ford, George H. W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush; a Yalie was on a major-party ticket in every election from 1972 to 2004.
Q 18Which street of mansions did Dickens reportedly call the most beautiful in America?
Hillhouse Avenue
He visited during his 1840s American tour; the university now owns many of the houses.
Q 19Architect James Gamble Rogers made Yale's 1917-31 Collegiate Gothic buildings look old by doing what?
splashing acid on the walls
He also left empty niches to suggest statues stolen over the centuries; underneath, most buildings have 1930s steel frames.
Q 20Yale's 216-foot Harkness Tower was reinforced in 1964 to hold what?
a carillon
The tower was originally a free-standing stone structure, unusual among the steel-framed Gothic buildings around it.
Q 24The Peabody Museum of Natural History was founded in 1866 at the urging of which palaeontologist, Peabody's nephew?
Othniel Charles Marsh
Its Great Hall of Dinosaurs holds a mounted Brontosaurus and the 110-foot mural The Age of Reptiles.
Q 25Which architect designed Yale's Ingalls Rink and its Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges?
Eero Saarinen
Kahn did the Art Gallery and Center for British Art, and Rudolph the Art & Architecture Building; all feature in architecture survey courses.
Q 26Yale's teams are known as what?
the Bulldogs
They compete in NCAA Division I's Ivy League; the school colour has been Yale Blue since 1894.
Q 27Yale's bulldog Handsome Dan, established in 1889, is believed to have been the first what in America?
college mascot
The original won first prize at Westminster and is preserved in a glass case in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.
Q 28Which future Broadway composer wrote Yale's official fight song, 'Bulldog', as a student?
Cole Porter
The far more famous 'Boola Boola' is not the official fight song, though it gave Yale its unofficial motto.
Q 29Yale's sunken 1914 football stadium was the prototype for which Pasadena venue?
the Rose Bowl
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was modelled on it too; it sits in the Walter Camp Field complex.
Q 30Which Yale alumnus is known as 'the Father of American Football'?
Walter Camp
The Harvard–Yale rivalry that he helped shape began in 1875 and is called simply 'The Game'.