Courtesy of Kennedy Smith

For this upcoming summer, low-income Yalies will have less financial support for their summer storage. 

This year, Yale College will reduce the financial support for summer storage from 75 percent, with a cap at $340 per student, to 50 percent, with a cap at $225. In the summer of 2023, Yale College offered full storage reimbursement, giving low-income students a flat $400 for their storage needs. Until summer 2023, Yale allowed all students to store their things in residential college basements free of charge. 

But this year, low-income students will have to pay more out of pocket. 

“Summer storage –  it is a necessity,” said Melangelo Pride ’26, who is a first-generation, low-income, or FGLI, student. “We have to have our stuff with us and we have to be able to store it over summer. It’s a big worry for people who can’t afford it.” 

Pride added that she’s trying to introduce policies to include summer storage in financial aid packages and external scholarships. The main problem, she says, is that summer storage “is just not seen as a necessity.” 

Kennedy Smith ’26, who is also an FGLI student, emphasized that finding a way to pay for storage “out of pocket” is a stress-inducing burden for low-income students and their families. 

“The cost of even a storage unit out of pocket is something that I don’t think I could prepare myself for … If your family is unable to support you with those costs, then you’re left alone with this big expense right at the end of the year that you don’t know how to account for,” Smith said.

When asked whether Yale’s summer storage support for low income students could ever go back to full reimbursement, Burgwell Howard, associate dean of Yale College, wrote that he “do[es] not anticipate that the university’s level of support will increase” since they have been in a “phased mode” the last three years. 

Smith speculated that the amount of support from the University would keep decreasing until the University stopped providing support. 

He said that Dean of Student Life Melanie Boyd sent an email to students in March 2023 which “made clear” that the financial assistance the University would provide low income students after there was no longer a residential college basement summer storage option would be “temporary” and would “reduce it by a certain amount each year until they no longer provided support.”

Smith is also the founder of SummerStore, a Yale-only moving and storage service that is a “vetted partner” of the university and eligible for the student discount. He said SummerStore will continue its commitment towards affordability by offering new tiered pricing options —10, 20, and 30-item plans — rather than last year’s flat $250 dollars. 

He also noted that SummerStore is competing in the Startup Yale competition to secure funding to expand access to more students.

Yale has 14 residential colleges.