Yale sets second consecutive record of Latine enrollment share
The class of 2028 enrolled 19 percent of Latine students, the first class to match the national Latine U.S. population share. The News spoke with five Yale community members about the growing Latine population.
Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor
When Natalia Armas Perez ’28 first arrived on campus, she was caught off guard by the number of Latine students in her class.
Armas Perez comes from a rural, majority-Latine town in California where she said many parts of the community are influenced by Latine culture, and was initially worried about feeling “like a fish out of water.”
“Coming here, I realized that I shouldn’t have been worried because there is a community here, and it’s a consolating fact that my ethnic group is getting greater representation over time,” she said.
According to the first-year class profile released by the admissions office, 19 percent of the class of 2028 identifies as Hispanic or Latino, a one-percentage point increase from the class of 2027 and the largest share of Latine students in Yale’s history.
This increase — followed the first admissions cycle after the end of affirmation action. For the first time, the share of Latine students in a first-year class matches the national U.S. share of the Latine population.
“This is an important interruption and it creates an opportunity for Yale to continue educating Latine leaders who will then return to their communities and, in turn, further share the impact of a Yale education broadly,” said Eileen Galvez, the director of La Casa Cultural.
Over the past year, Galvez led multifaceted efforts to attract Latine enrollment to Yale, such as exposing prospective students to the “vibrant and lively” community at La Casa, reaching out to majority-Latine high schools across the nation and highlighting identity-based student organizations.
Galvez thinks La Casa’s focus on Spanish-language programming for families and caregivers of admitted students made a tangible difference in Latine enrollment. Since about a third of all FGLI students are Latine, she said there is a “direct responsibility” to connect with families and think about what their socioeconomic background means holistically.
“Sharing with [families] what their children will have access to at Yale, but more importantly, how they will have people on campus looking out for them in a language they are most comfortable with –– these are quite special opportunities of building trust with families,” she said. “Ultimately, when we admit and enroll a student, it is not just the student we welcome to Yale, but entire family units as well.”
Armas Perez said that she knew her culture would be “represented and cared for” at Yale after seeing the representation of Latine students during Bulldog Days.
Other Latine students, like Alexander Dircio ’28, chose Yale because they knew Yale could assist them financially.
“When I was looking at colleges during the application cycle, I really wanted to apply to Yale because it felt less exclusive to those who have money,” he said.
Dircio added that after the end of affirmative action, fewer of his Latine peers applied to out-of-state schools thinking “they couldn’t get in,” as well as due to the lower costs of in-state schools. He did not expect an increase in Latine enrollment at a private school like Yale.
Ximena López Carrillo, an ethnicity, migration and race professor, said she and her colleagues were also pessimistic about the share of minority students in the class of 2028 and expected to see a drop in numbers.
“It was very surprising, in a good way, to see that it actually didn’t happen,” she said. “I think that just shows that students that come from minority groups are here not just because they are recipients of affirmative action. That shows that people who arrive to these places are right here because they have the excellence.”
An increased presence of Latine students on campus means different things for students and faculty.
Armas Perez emphasized the importance of representation, adding that one of her biggest motivations is to inspire other Latinas. She added that she is trying to convince more Latina students from her high school to apply to Ivy League and private schools.
López Carrillo agrees that a more diverse population at Yale, rather than a stereotypical monolith, encourages people from less advantaged backgrounds to apply and “not be discouraged by fear.”
She added that diversity is necessary in research for scholars to reflect on their privileges in an elitist institution, how they produce knowledge, how that knowledge is used and what they should do to create positive change. Diversity in academia, she said, also improves the quality of research.
“What makes universities special is the exchange of ideas from different backgrounds,” she said. “The greater presence of Latinos contributes to that exchange of experiences, of perspectives. It not only benefits Latinos or the university itself, but it benefits everyone.”
She cited the explosion of new ideas and critical research about class, racial relations, ethnicity and community organization that followed the increased diversity in higher education in the 1960s and 1970s.
According to Maryam Parhizkar, the interim associate director of La Casa, an increased number of Latine students on campus also means more intersectionality and diversity among Latine students –– such as more Latine students who also identify as Black, Asian or Native American. She emphasized that the Latine community is not a homogenous community, and hopes that more people will understand this complexity as Latine presence increases on campus.
Parhizkar added that outside of ethnicity and race, more Latine students on campus means more Latine students from diverse geographical and socioeconomic backgrounds.
According to Galvez, the number of Dominican, Venezuelan, Salvadoran and Guatemalan students has been rising during the past few years, and she believes that South American representation will increase in the coming years. She also said that increased diversity among Latine students creates more opportunities for cross-cultural learning and solidarity building.
Armas Perez experienced this solidarity when she met a student from the same region of Mexico as her at the extracurricular bazaar during Bulldog Days.
“It’s like, not a build-in best friend, but a built-in cultural connection,” she said.
With more students identifying as Latine, Galvez also highlighted the demand for more resources for student activities and organizations. La Casa had to cancel their annual “Latinexcellence” showcase this year due to a lack of staffing, and Galvez said it’s difficult for the staff to serve students to the best of their ability when they are reaching critical points of burnout.
Regardless, she believes that this is “such an exciting time to be a Latine student at Yale.”
La Casa is located at 301 Crown St.