When my best friend moved away to college, we started mailing letters back and forth. I loved reading her adventures in a new and exciting place and she loved stories of home. While we live in the 21st century and can communicate with one another at incredible speed, something about a handwritten letter felt special. We felt more connected. After I got into Yale, we were excited to write to each other about the academics, the social life and all of the qualities that make Yale — in my completely unbiased opinion — the best university in the world. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten the chance.

Most college students can receive letters and packages for free in or around their dorm building, and my non-Yale friends can pick up their packages the same day they are delivered. But between the campus’ gothic architecture and the initiation rituals I’ve seen recently, it’s clear that Yale likes to do things differently — including the mail. 

Traditionally, the United States Postal Service drops off all of a university’s mail in one location, and it’s the university’s task to sort and distribute their own mail. Yale instead has a University Post Office and Student Package Center. If a student wants to receive letters for a school year, they must pay the outrageous price of $176 for an extra small P.O. box, while the line at the Student Package Center is eternal and packages consistently arrive late. While these sound like first-world problems, juxtaposed with the literal castles we live in and the decadent meals we’re served every day, the mailing situation seems rather ridiculous.

A common misconception is to blame the mail problem on the high quantity of students. This year, Yale is housing 6,255 undergraduate and graduate students. High mail volume is bound to cause a plethora of logistical nightmares, yet universities with more students and less funding still manage to maintain a decent postal service. Yale has no excuse. Yale’s unfortunate divergence from postal norms stems from three factors: avoidance of burdens, poor use of space and shortage of labor.

Yale has decided that the mail is an us problem, not a Yale problem. Section 631.62 of the Postal Operations Manual prevents the USPS from sorting mail exclusively for a university. If Yale sorted its own mail, we wouldn’t have to pay for P.O. boxes. However, it would be costly and time consuming for Yale to sort and distribute its own mail, so the burden of cost is shifted to the students. As a result, P.O. box fees have skyrocketed to keep the postal service afloat, and since the USPS is not accountable to students or the University, it lacks incentive to provide quality and efficient service. Yale Mail should be managed by Yale, not the USPS.

Yale also needs to reconsider its impractical organization of space. Centralizing sorting and pick-up for all 14 colleges while separating packages from letters is repulsively illogical. Yale Station should be used exclusively for sorting mail by residential college; eliminating the pick-up area will free up more space for sorting. Then, each residential college, or pair of residential colleges, needs its own mail space to sort by suite, rather than each individual student, and distribute its mail via boxes.

Finally, because our mail employees are too overworked, Yale must hire more workers. This would produce benefits of efficiency through more labor and create more student jobs, which are scarce at the moment. We need to treat our postal workers better. They are some of the most dedicated people on the planet and Yale’s are no exception. They tolerate all of our privileged whining, diligently sorting our endless mail and have the grace to always hand us our packages with a smile. More workers and better conditions would drastically improve the labor that goes into Yale’s mailing system and our experience as students.

Being at Yale has been such an incredible blessing. I’ve fallen in love with the academics, the environment and the people, but I miss handwritten letters. Maybe one day I’ll be able to justify the outrageous price of a P.O. Box, but that’s the same kind of temporary solution that has led to over a century’s worth of problems. Instead, I’m calling on the University to fix mail at Yale. 

FAITH DUNCAN is a first year in Saybrook College. Contact her at faith.duncan@yale.edu.