Yale News

Yale’s newest Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid is a first-generation college student whose own education was made possible by financial aid.

Kari DiFonzo comes to the University from Wellesley College, where she studied as an undergraduate from 2003 to 2007 and worked in the Office of Student Financial Services until this year. She assumed the the role in August, following Scott Wallace-Juedes’s February departure and Alex Muro’s direction in the interim. At Yale, DiFonzo hopes to make the financial aid application process easier for returning undergraduates and improve the office’s efficiency and messaging.

“It became a true passion for me, providing access and affordability, being able to talk to students about how these amazing, highly selective elite institutions really can be affordable to students and to families,” DiFonzo told the News.

Upbringing and education at Wellesley

DiFonzo was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee to two parents who did not attend college.

As a high school senior, DiFonzo won a scholarship and was paired with a college counselor from a community-based organization that provided college access counseling. Encouraged by her counselor, she began considering schools outside of Georgia and Tennessee.

“Growing up, I never ever would have considered a women’s college; I never would have considered moving to Yankee territory up here in New England,” she said. “I was a southern gal and just thought I’d always stay in the South.”

But when she first visited Wellesley’s quintessentially New England campus, DiFonzo said, she fell in love.

DiFonzo added that Wellesley only became attainable to her because of generous and easily attainable financial aid.

“The deciding factor for me on where I went to college was the financial aid program,” she told the News. “Wellesley gave me more financial aid than any other school I was accepted to, and gave me all need-based financial aid, rather than merit-based aid. I worried about merit aid because I knew that my family’s finances were not likely to change, and I just didn’t know if I’d be able to maintain a 3.5 GPA when I got to college.” 

She explained that while need-based aid is offered to students depending only on their family’s financial situation, students on merit-based aid must maintain a certain academic standing in order to continue receiving funding. Typically, only highly selective institutions with significant endowments are able to offer need-based aid, she added.

DiFonzo matriculated to Wellesley College as an undergraduate in 2003.

Part of DiFonzo’s financial aid package required her to undertake a work-study job. Early on in her first year, she began working at Wellesley’s student accounts office — a program under the financial aid office, she explained.

She kept the job all four years as an undergraduate. When she graduated Wellesley in 2007 as a political science and women and gender studies double major, DiFonzo recalled struggling to find gainful employment in the political field. 

“I was really just looking for a job so that I could pay the bills until I could find what I really wanted to do,” DiFonzo said. “There was someone retiring from the financial aid office. And for that reason, I applied for the job.”

She got the job, and began working full-time in Wellesley’s financial aid office as a customer service employee in 2007. 

Working at the front desk, DiFonzo noted that she managed work-study students and was the first point of contact between undergraduate students and the financial aid office.

“Over the next 11 years, I realized that I just absolutely loved what I did,” she said. “And I just kept working my way up. So I became an assistant director, and then a senior assistant director, and then an associate director, and then eventually became director of student financial services at Wellesley.” 

In all, DiFonzo worked in Wellesley’s financial aid office for 20 years — four as an undergrad on work-study and 16 as a full-time staff member.

Goals for improvements at Yale

In her new role as the Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid at Yale, DiFonzo hopes to implement much of the work she did at Wellesley — which focused largely on making messaging and communication about financial aid more personalized and accessible. 

“I know that the financial aid program and application can be really challenging and difficult to navigate,” she said. “Particularly for lesser-resourced, first-generation families or immigrant families, it can be really hard to talk about money or to ask for help understanding how to navigate the letters that you’re receiving and the information from the financial aid office.”

At Wellesley, DiFonzo said she and her team were able to successfully simplify financial aid messaging, eliminating complicated jargon from regular emails. The core of her mission is to frame financial aid communications in a way that a 16- or 17-year-old applicant can understand.

DiFonzo said that she is in talks with Yale’s office of undergraduate financial aid about simplifying messaging at the University, as well as clarifying the aid process for returning students.

She added that the office began addressing the latter goal last year, when they collaborated with the College Board to pilot Profile Lite, a simplified financial aid application for returning undergraduate students. 

But she thinks this process can be made even simpler.

“If a really low-income student has shown us that they are low-income and that they can’t afford to pay for Yale, what information do we really need from them year after year after year?” DiFonzo said. “Do we need to have them prove to us over and over again how under-resourced their family is?”

At Wellesley, DiFonzo and her team created a caseload model of financial aid, wherein each financial aid officer is responsible for a certain section of the student population.

Under the caseload model, DiFonzo explained, students work consistently with one officer throughout their undergraduate years. She said that this process eliminates the amount of self-directed work returning students have to put into their financial aid applications each year and personalizes the process to make students more comfortable talking about the aid they need.

“What we were finding was that students were telling us they kept having to relive their trauma, they kept having to retell their story each year,” she said. “And creating this counseling model where students are connected to one individual creates a relationship where hopefully students don’t have to tell us for the third year in a row about their dad’s cancer treatments or about their mom losing her job. We had really, really positive reactions from our students.”

The caseload model received positive feedback from Wellesley students, DiFonzo said. She added that the model also improved customer service response times and helped students better understand deadlines and requirements for their aid applications.

According to DiFonzo, a similar model used to exist at Yale but was abandoned. She hopes to bring it back in the coming years, she said.

Working toward these plans, she hopes to remedy the office’s slow response times and confusing communication, about which students have recently lodged complaints.

“When I started in August and found where customer service stood in this office and how backlogged things were, I was shocked and knew that immediately I had to take steps to make improvements,” DiFonzo said. 

According to DiFonzo, some improvements that have already been instated include having the financial aid committee meet twice a week, rather than once a week, to review financial aid appeals.

She is also working with the University Office of Financial Aid to reform the technology used to create aid packages, she said.

“I was very impressed with her work at Wellesley,” Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis said of DiFonzo to the News. “One thing she did a lot of was improving the customer service angle of financial aid, making it so that you get your financial aid award sooner, that information is more readily available, that kind of thing. I am really impressed with the fact that she has obviously taken on more and more responsibility.

Lewis added that he thinks DiFonzo is “really ready” for her new post at Yale.

DiFonzo was selected for the position in June, following a national search chaired by Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan. She began the role on August 21.

“Kari is a responsive and inclusive leader as well as an accomplished strategic thinker,” Quinlan wrote in an email to the News. “She is exceptionally well-positioned to direct Yale’s extraordinary undergraduate financial aid program at a time when Yale College is larger and more socio-economically diverse than ever before.”

The office of undergraduate financial aid distributes more than $220 million in need-based financial aid annually.