Tag Archive: financial aid

  1. Job Well Done

    Leave a Comment

    When I was applying to college, I remember reading the following quote “Studying, Socializing and Sleep: Most students choose the first two.” While I understand that almost all undergraduates struggle with time management, I’ve found that some students have a different equation to consider. Some must decide between four options. They have to consider student work before choosing between the other three.

    I face that choice on a day-to-daily basis. When I arrived on campus freshman year, I immediately began looking for a job. I knew I needed one. I was lucky enough to have received generous financial aid from Yale, and part of that package was on-campus work. I was naive — I thought I would find a job right away, that the money would go straight into my pocket and that all my financial problems would evaporate.

    And so, during my first semester at Yale, I worked two jobs. One in Sterling Memorial Library, stacking books at 9 a.m. three times a week, and the second in the Admissions Office. As I clocked up over 15 hours a week at work, I was pleased with the paycheck, but not as pleased with my schedule. I was exhausted, frustrated and behind on school work. I had stopped working at the library by December.

    * * *

    As I spoke to Grace Chiang ’15 in Bass Cafe, I immediately began to relate to her day-to-day Yale experience. Like me, she is an international student who, at one point, worked 20 hours a week. As she described her busy schedule, I thought I fully understood her circumstances.

    Then, she told me a story that I didn’t want to believe. Chiang began her junior year as an economics and history double major. However, this May, she will only graduate with a degree in economics. Why? One professor thought she was working too many hours.

    In one of her recent history seminars, the professor distributed homework assignments on Monday to be submitted on Wednesday — the three days Chiang needed to work. When she approached the professor, asking if she could receive the assignments earlier in the week, her professor dismissed her need to work three jobs. The professor asked if Chiang was mentally stable and told her she should consider withdrawing from Yale in order to “reevaluate her priorities.”

    “Are you cracked? That’s what she said to me,” Chiang remembered. The professor then threatened to report her to her residential college dean.

    And this was not the only time someone asked Chiang if she wanted to withdraw for financial reasons. When Chiang asked her dean for advice about paying a required fee, the dean presented her with withdrawal forms instead of the support she needed.

    Chiang is not alone.

    Sara Miller ’16, a former photography editor for the News, said having five jobs has undoubtedly affected her academic experience. She believes that students from low-income backgrounds may not have the same preparation that some of their peers have, meaning they sometimes can benefit from more hours of studying or tutoring. She told me that she was expecting to be behind when she came to Yale, but that she could not have anticipated how behind she would actually be.

    Michaela Johnson ’17 and I became friends when we realized that our paths to Yale were very similar — we had both experienced the consequences of being “low-income.” We both initially struggled to find a path at Yale that followed our academic ambitions, as well as our desire to pursue time-intensive extracurricular activities. The main problem, though, was remaining financially stable.

    Johnson said her most difficult academic experiences occur at the beginning of the semester, when some professors fail to recognize that she cannot spend hundreds of dollars on course packets and textbooks. “I don’t have my textbooks for the semester yet,” she told me three weeks into the term. “It’s awkward to explain to a professor why you don’t have the book yet.”

    While Johnson has not been asked to withdraw from Yale, she recounted a number of times when professors and advisors have asked why she works so many hours. The answer she gives every time: “I have to.”

    * * *

    A new Yale College Council task force on financial aid addresses the problems of Chiang, Johnson and many other students. It recently published a report that revealed one scary statistic: 56 percent of survey participants claimed working long hours “adversely affected” their college experience.

    “Adversely” is a strong word and not necessarily how I would describe my own experience. Right now, I work for a minimum of eight hours a week, sometimes a lot more, at a job for which I’m grateful. Not everyone is as lucky, and going to work can sometimes be a chore. According to the YCC report, students in this financial bracket could take one or two more classes per semester if they didn’t spend 12 hours a week fulfilling their student effort expectation.

    Johnson didn’t say she would take another class. She said she would catch up on sleep.

    When I asked YCC President Michael Herbert ’16 about the report, he posed an interesting question, “To what extent do we want students from poorer economic backgrounds to have [their time] constrained by work obligations?”

    Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway said he does recognize the limitations put on students who have to work but added that the ultimate decisions about budget are both beyond his control and also encompass many larger questions. Holloway said using student employees in different “important jobs” on campus — for example, in laboratories and libraries — helps contribute to running the University efficiently. Students are “indispensable” in ensuring that the university stays running, he said.

    However, several students told me that work has sometimes kept them from the opportunities that led them to Yale. While they might be “indispensable” to Holloway and the University, some feel that they are not able to contribute to campus culture in a meaningful way.

    For example, students said that working so many hours prevented them from obtaining leadership roles they otherwise would wanted. In some cases, they said they felt cheated by a system favoring those who don’t have to balance extracurriculars with both school and employment. Some students believe that their peers with prominent positions on campus have a financial privilege that is not representative of the student body. This is because these positions demand a very sizable time commitment.

    For instance, current president of the Yale International Relations Association Alessandra Powell ’16 does not currently have a job. She said holding her position while also working would be possible, “but not a great experience.”

    Herbert does not hold a student job either. He devotes, on average, 16 to 20 hours a week to his YCC presidency. While he noted that he is a member of NROTC, which pays a generous monthly stipend and requires a similar work commitment, he said “there is no way I [also] would be able to add an on campus job.”

    Last year, Miller ran for YCC president. In an opinion article she published in the YDN, she wrote that she would have to take out a loan if elected, in order to satisfy the $3,350 self-help portion of her financial aid package. Chiang said that many of her friends on financial aid have never been able to hold a leadership position in an on-campus organization.

    “Yale promises an equal opportunity when you get here, and that simply isn’t the case,” she told me recently.

    Over the course of the coming semester, Herbert and the rest of the YCC Task Force will continue working with University administrators. Herbert told me that the discussions have been “terrific” so far, and that he hopes to share good news with students before the end of the year.

    * * *

    Still, even though many working students are frustrated with the system in place, not everyone has had a negative experience with student employment. In fact, some students have gained important experience from their jobs, including professional connections and skills. Some jobs allow for academic research. Some students can mentor others in their field.

    My experience working in an office with adults is a nice change of pace in a student-centric day. It’s a real job in a real office, and my performance can have real consequences for the staff who work there full time. Yes, the job can sometimes involve menial work or manual labor, but then, my post-graduation job probably won’t be that glamorous either. As a freshman, I was able to meet upperclassmen, make some really good friends and, by the end of the year, I had a new, unexpected confidence.

    Justin Schuster ’15 spoke with similar enthusiasm when telling me about his three jobs on campus. He is an Arabic tutor, he writes up events for the Macmillan Center and he may have served you that last coffee as a barista at Bass Café. Due to the variety of these tasks, he said he has no problems managing the workload. And, for students who think managing employment and student leadership impossible, he serves as a counter-example. Last year, he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Politic and has also managed a conference for YIRA.

    Some students even find jobs that align with their professional interests. To Billy Cavell ’17, who wishes to pursue a career in acting, working as an usher at the Yale Repertory Theater also allows him to meet students in the Yale School of Drama who can offer advice. While he sometimes spends 19 hours a week giving out programs, he does not think it has hindered his college experience in any way.

    Enjoying a student job can help some of the problems to dissipate. When midterms come around and tensions rise, I am confident that Cavell and Schuster will remain satisfied with employment. It’s not everyone’s story, but it is one that we can aspire to.

    * * *

    When Johnson and I inevitably get dinner one day next week, we will both complain that the days are too short. Twenty-four hours aren’t enough. Adding a campus job into the “Studying, Socializing and Sleep” equation is no easy task, and we may be the busiest people we each know. However, I doubt either of us would be comfortable with letting one view of campus culture stop us from succeeding. Each of the students I spoke with conveyed their determination and conviction to ensure that the Yale education they were promised was the Yale education they are going to receive.

    “People just don’t talk about this problem,” Chiang said. I think it may be time.

  2. More Work Than Study?

    Leave a Comment

    It is 1957, and freshmen are sweating for reasons other than the perpetual nervous energy particular to first year students at Yale. They’re in Commons, and they’re working hard. Busing dishes, washing them and sweeping are all components of their jobs. These students are “self-supported.” This essentially means that they spend their mealtimes cleaning up after their classmates instead of socializing with them. These students work 12 hours a week, and they comprise 30 percent of Yale’s undergraduate population.

    Today, 57 years later, students face similar policies. In 2014, the Provost’s Office created a new work-study policy that echoes many of the marked class difference of Old Yale. Before this, the office paid 50 percent of every student worker’s salary. This year, in order to offset the endowment’s deficit, the office will only give the salary split to students on financial aid — and only for salaries of $15 an hour and below.

    In theory, of course, employers are still free to hire students not on financial aid and at wages of over $15 an hour. But if they do, they will lose at least $7.50 an hour per person. In both cases, many people working on campus do so because they have no other options.

    In turn, these workers have student income contributions to meet. This is the tuition percentage the financial aid office requires them to earn during the school year. Without being able to earn more than $15 an hour, effectively a sort of maximum wage, some students have either had to take on multiple jobs or, for lack of time, take out more loans, in order to meet 100 percent of their own demonstrated need.

    ***

    Tyler Blackmon ’16, a staff columnist for the Yale Daily News, is one such worker. When he sits down with me for coffee, he is out of breath from running. He tells me he didn’t want be late, making him arguably the most earnest person I’ve ever had the privilege to interview. He has enormous eyes and an equally enormous capacity for articulating his views. Needless to say, when he found out about this policy late last year, he wrote an article condemning the effects it would have on low-income students.

    Blackmon grew up on a ranch and comes from a low-income family. He has been on work-study since his freshman year. Back then, it was still relatively easy for him to earn all of his required student contribution. But as his Yale career has advanced, this component of his financial aid package has become more of a burden.

    “One thing that is particularly troubling is that whenever you go from being a freshman to a sophomore, the work expectation skyrockets,” he said. “The University promises incoming freshmen these star-studded financial aid packages, and then the next year they hit you with something that’s not so great.”

    This year, his student income contribution has increased again. Blackmon works for the School of Medicine’s web group and was due for a raise to $16 an hour. However, because of the change in work-study policy, he did not receive this raise — his boss, he said, wasn’t keen on spending what would have come to an extra $8.50 an hour. He has had to take out more loans.

    “My schedule is saturated. I didn’t have more time to work. I didn’t have loans freshman year, I had a few sophomore year and this year I’ve taken on a few more,” he explained.

    He went on to say that if he hadn’t been working since freshman year, he would have participated in more extracurricular activities. Taken more classes. Gotten more out of his College Experience.

    Molly Mullen ’17 expressed a similar idea. “The things we do outside of class are so important to Yale students, and everybody wishes they could do more of them. I think it’s limiting for some people to have another six hours of their week or more already taken away because they still need to pay for their tuition. I think it’s a class issue,” she said.

    Mullen works five hours a week in a geology lab, even though her financial aid package this year indicates that she should work 10.

    “My parents are paying more than they’re technically supposed to. They wanted me to join clubs and spend time doing, you know, college things.”

    ***

    Laura Kellman ’15, a board member and former staffer at the Women’s Center, shares a different perspective. She’s employed but not on financial aid.

    “If this policy had been implemented last year, I would never have been hired. It’s been a really important part of my Yale experience and community,” she said.

    She’s only able to continue working this year because board decisions were made before the policy came out last semester. Otherwise, she thinks she would have been cut.

    In part because of this, Kellman feels that the policy isn’t just detrimental to low-income work-study students: It hurts the entire community.

    “It’s a bad thing when a certain group of people is working 13 hours a week because they have to, and for another group of people, working doesn’t even cross their mind,” she said.

    This is understandable — Yale students are busy. Those who don’t think about work have other activities on their minds, clubs to run, meetings to attend. But Tobias Holden ’17 agrees with Kellman. He thinks we should all should be considering our job prospects, regardless of financial aid.

    “People will care to learn about ‘high class’ things, like fancy art, for example, but people who already have access to that culture won’t know anything about getting a job. But I think that’s … a really important thing to know,” he said, laughing.

    Kellman also takes issue with these differences in priorities, which, she believes, are rooted in class. She thinks the change in work-study policy will only exacerbate the current situation. And she’s had to put significant thought into class this semester, as she is constituency coordinator at the Women’s Center and therefore plays an important role in hiring.

    “We’re probably the only group on campus in which students do the hiring, so we were in the awkward position of asking other students about their financial aid status,” she says. The group didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking directly — “I come from a background where asking people about this kind of thing is very taboo” — and so they instead searched for applicants’ eligibility for the 50/50 split on the Provost’s Office website.

    Still, to Kellman and her co-workers, this didn’t quite solve the problem. It only posed a new set of questions: Did this technique violate the applicants’ privacy? Should they check an administrative website or ask an awkward question?

    In theory, Kellman isn’t opposed to class conversations, she just thinks the new policy will aggravate the already-marked socio-economic differences between students. In fact, she thinks the University should eliminate work-study.

    “The fact that there is a student income contribution at all really contributes to class differences,” she said.

    ***

    In late August of my freshman year, the other members of my class and I sweat in Woolsey Hall. This time it’s not because we are washing dishes or busing plates — it’s because the hall is too small for thirteen hundred people, even when they’re completely sedentary. We sit and sweat and await University President Peter Salovey’s speech — today the president of our (our!) university will tell us something that must be important: why we are here, how we got here, what we are to do with ourselves now that we are.

    From pamphlets and speeches like this one, it’s clear that Yale is proud of all the progress it has made. Fifty-three percent of students admitted last year receive aid, and the administration raised the financial aid budget to a record $120 million. Today, despite these encouraging facts, Salovey addresses the class of 2017 for the first time to talk about class, inequality and the American Dream.

    His narrative is inspirational — granted, it’s not his narrative, but his father’s story. Ronald Salovey was the son of poor, immigrant parents: He grew up in the Bronx, went to Bronx Science, then City College of New York, then Brooklyn College, then (gasp) Harvard, then settled down to marry, raise young Pete in a middle-class neighborhood, and then, finally, voilà, he was the Dream actualized.

    Why does Peter Salovey talk to us about the American Dream? Certainly not to brag about his father’s success. No, it’s “to assure [students] — especially those from families that are not affluent — that that dream is very much alive here at Yale.” Salovey cites the facts: College completion is increasing only for those in the top half of the socio-economic spectrum. He wants to play an important role in changing that statistic.

    At this point, I have fallen asleep. But, in retrospect, I’m certain many of my peers were wide awake and thinking about their American Dream and how Yale would make it possible.

    Some of us, maybe, have been dreaming the Yale dream since we were four and learned how to spell it. Some of us probably applied to Yale on whim.

    Some always knew Yale was a possibility. Some never even thought it conceivable. Twelve percent of us are first-generation college students. Fifty-seven percent of us went to public schools. Fifty percent of us are on financial aid.

    To be eligible for that aid, families must earn less than $200,000. If that salary is the invisible line separating the top and bottom halves of the income distribution range, then Yale truly is, in Salovey’s words, “a great equalizer.” But the median income in the United States is $51,017.

    “Last year’s freshman address was ‘We Should Talk About Class,’” Blackmon says. “If it’s all words and no action, it’s more harm than good.”

  3. Cents and Sensibility

    Leave a Comment

    At 10 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, 15 students arrived at Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions to stage a sit-in. They were protesting Yale’s financial aid policies, which they saw as tightfisted. As a result, the office at 38 Hillhouse Ave. was closed for much of the day. Yale police officers were posted outside.

    Around midday, a 150-person rally spearheaded by the Undergraduate Organizing Committee marched from Cross Campus to the Admissions Office, where they waved signs, led chants and played drums. Disappointed by noncommittal statements from University President Richard Levin, the UOC presented a petition with over 1,100 student signatures demanding more generous financial aid for Yale’s lower-income students.

    With students adding to the pressure already created by Harvard’s and Princeton’s recent financial aid reforms, Levin announced one week later that the parental contribution for families with incomes below $45,000 would be eliminated and that families earning under $60,000 would face a reduced burden, a move that affected some 800 families. It was the largest change to Yale’s financial aid policy since 2001.

    To boost efforts to recruit lower-income students, Yale launched a Student Ambassadors Program, to send current Yalies to promote the University in high schools, particularly in low-income areas where it may not be as well-known.

    In 2008, Yale announced another round of financial aid expansion. The family contribution was eliminated for most families making under $60,000, and families making under $200,000 would also see a significant cut in their Yale bills. The self-help requirement for students was almost halved.

    From $48 million in 2004–’05, Yale’s annual financial aid budget now exceeds $120 million. Yale also partners with QuestBridge, an organization that recruits high-achieving low-income students for need-blind elite schools, and provides 790 families earning under $65,000 a full financial aid package with no expected family contribution.

    Despite a sharp drop in Yale’s endowment due to the financial crisis, expected student contributions from all sources have remained well below their pre-reform highs.

    But student costs are now rising once again. For the 2010–’11 school year, the self-help component of the financial aid package was raised 15 percent over the preceding year. This year, self-help was lowered for freshmen but raised for upperclassmen, hitting $3,200 for the latter. The student income contribution, which students are expected to earn over the summer, has also increased, growing by $450 since 2009.

    Without exception, students from low-income backgrounds interviewed for this article are effusive in their praise for Yale’s financial aid policies. They came from families where neither parent had been to college and high schools that offered few or no Advanced Placement classes and discouraged college counseling. In many ways, they say, they have adjusted well to a new academic and social milieu and distinguished themselves in their extracurriculars.

    But the playing field is still not level. During the applications process, on campus and over the summer, lower-income students confront social, academic and financial challenges that they never anticipated.

    The Admissions Gap

    Alejandro Gutierrez ’13 grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, Calif. Neither of his parents had gone to college; “they had no idea what Yale was,” he says. But he went to a magnet high school for students pursuing careers in medicine, and he excelled there.

    Gutierrez was guided in the college application process by a program for minority students that he attended the summer after his junior year, but he only applied to Yale once his counselor encouraged him to do so that October.

    Though he had gone through a prep program, Gutierrez says he felt intimidated discussing his approach to applications once he got to Yale because of “how well-versed everybody was in the whole college application experience.”

    In high school, Gutierrez adds, “I didn’t even know about early action.”

    For many Yalies, the path to New Haven started well before high school. For legacies, it started before they were born. For those who attended elite private schools, it started with the highly credentialed teachers and counselors that pushed them to excel.

    But most high-achievers never start down that path at all.

    That’s the conclusion reached in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper published two months ago. In “The Missing ‘One-Offs,’” Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery draw from demographic data, admissions statistics and test scores to tell the story of where high-achieving students come from and where they end up.

    The results can be disheartening. Hoxby and Avery estimate that the vast majority of high-achieving, low-income students don’t even apply to a selective institution of any kind; facing social and financial pressures and lacking information, many simply enroll at community colleges. Recruiting these students can be difficult. Though multiple sources can provide the contact information of high-achieving high schoolers to universities, it can be tough for a school like Yale to reach out to students who never thought of it as an option.

    The current recruitment strategies of elite schools are “necessary, but probably not sufficient,” Avery says.

    “We’re going to have to develop even more elaborate strategies … to try to educate students about the possibilities that are made available to them.”

    When it came time to submit their applications, many current Yale students say they received little encouragement and had few reliable sources of information. Melinda Becker ’15, who hails from a small town in northwest Kansas, recalls that her high school counselor laughed at her when she told him that she was applying to Yale. Rebekah Stewart ’13 says she was told by her college counselor that QuestBridge was a scam. David Truong ’14 says his college counselor told him that his school district wouldn’t let him apply through QuestBridge.

    Despite reforms, the number of Yalies from lower-income backgrounds has changed very little. In 2005, when the University’s financial aid policies were rewritten to sharply reduce or eliminate the family contribution from families earning under $60,000, the News reported that 800 Yale families fell into that category and would benefit from the new policy.

    But instead of rising, the number of lower-income families with students at Yale has stagnated. Today, only 790 Yale families receive full financial aid.

    Social divides

    MacBooks. Dooney & Bourke bags. MoMA and the Met. These were the things that, she says, set her apart.

    It didn’t take long for Shanaz Chowdhery ’13 to notice that people were different at Yale. “There was all this cultural capital that people seemed to have,” she says.

    Where she was from, no one read The New Yorker on Sundays.

    The differences weren’t just cultural, either: Chowdhery recalls her shock at seeing girls walking around campus with $100 handbags.

    After she noticed that so many students here used Macs, she says, she looked up the price and couldn’t believe her eyes. Her classmates were lounging on Old Campus with $2,000 laptops.

    Chowdhery’s father put her generic Windows laptop on a credit card. She believes he was paying it off her entire freshman year.

    Even after being admitted, many students from lower-income backgrounds feel socially aloof from their wealthier classmates.

    For Leonard Thomas ’14, feelings of difference and isolation were the largest obstacles to overcome as he transitioned from life in Detroit to being a student at Yale. “I felt poor here,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily feel poor in Detroit because I wasn’t the extreme case.

    “I’m an extreme case of poverty here.”

    David Truong ’14 still remembers what it was like to move into his freshman dorm. As he watched a suitemate buy a TV stand, a TV and an Xbox without hesitation, he cringed while paying for clothes hangers and plastic storage bins for his room. That first weekend when everyone was getting to know each other, Truong struggled with suite discussions about splitting the cost of a couch. The expectation that everyone would be contributing to the cost of furnishing the suite, while he thought it fair, was an adjustment.

    That expectation of spending does not disappear after move-in weekend. Jennifer Friedmann ’13 says that Yale has a “culture around money.” “You were expected to be able to go out to dinner,” she said. “If I had a coffee date with someone, it was expected that everyone was buying coffee and that it wasn’t a financial burden for anyone.” But Friedmann did not want the fact that she was on financial aid to interfere with her ability to socialize with anyone on campus, regardless of socio-economic background. By shopping at thrift stores, she says she found it more feasible to “be a social person on this campus without making people feel weird about me being on financial aid.”

    “Social gracefulness” is how she describes it.

    Still, the social experiences of students on financial aid vary widely. Several say they have never felt restrained due to their limited means. While some students say that they notice class distinctions among Yale students when it comes to things like fashion, they describe such differences as subtle, not significant to their Yale experience.

    “The divide exists if you make it exist,” says Steven Mendoza ’14. He was the first person in his single-parent home to go to college. After he graduated from high school, Mendoza was awarded a Gates Millennium Scholarship, which covers the part of his educational and living costs that his Yale financial aid does not.

    “I haven’t had to worry about money,” he says.

    Asked whether he felt a social divide existed between lower-income students and the rest of Yale, Mendoza’s answer was an emphatic no. “I have friends who are worth billions. I’m worth $2,000. I don’t see any difference in the way that they treat others who are the same as they are and the way they treat me,” he says. “I think Yale’s just a good campus at bringing people together.”

    Academic differences

    But for Mendoza and many other students, the difference between what they learned at school and the rigor their peers experienced at prep schools was immediately perceptible. Although the transition from high school to college is a significant one regardless of educational background, several students say they felt unprepared for Yale’s academic environment.

    “My first thought was, ‘These kids are prepped to succeed in the Ivy League system,’” recalls Mendoza, a California native. “And I was like, shit. I was prepped to succeed in a UC.”

    Becker still remembers being overwhelmed during the first week of Directed Studies, which she quickly dropped. “I didn’t know how to do close reading at all,” she says, recalling that her high school English class devoted three months to reading “1984.”

    In English 114, Becker says, “I had written how they told me to write in high school, and I was like pretty proud of myself.”

    Her teaching fellow told her work like that would earn her a D.

    Many students from lower-income backgrounds were unaccustomed to being surrounded by hard-driving classmates. Truong, who went to a public high school in Texas, did not write a single academic essay in his entire senior year. He took English 114 his freshman fall, where he felt that his writing level was far below that of his peers. When it came to the sciences, Truong was placed into Chemistry 114, where he struggled. While Truong’s science background looked good on paper, he says his high school honors chemistry class was not very rigorous.

    “I was not prepared for that level of academic intensity,” he said. His classmates, he said, were “much more intense than I expected compared to people at my high school.”

    In a pattern other students from less prestigious high schools may find familiar, Thomas says he found it difficult to ask TAs and professors for help when he was having a difficult time academically his freshman year because he had not gone to a high school where one went to teachers to ask questions. He says he was taught not to speak unless spoken to.

    “I felt like I had two humps to leap over: public school and poor,” he said.

    Though Yale does offer extensive academic support services, it can be difficult for tutors and deans to overcome a deep-rooted academic disadvantage and a learned reluctance to ask for help.

    Financial strings attached

    Sometimes, even asking for that help from the resources Yale makes available isn’t enough — especially when it comes to money.

    “A lot of my frustration freshman year was that nobody could tell me what to do, in terms of real-life stuff,” Thomas told the News. As a work-study student who is financially independent, he needed to learn how to file taxes. He had no home to return to over breaks because the transportation costs and the financial burden he would have placed on his family were too great, so he needed to figure out where he could live when the dorms closed and how he would feed himself. These were questions that Thomas felt his dean and FroCos couldn’t answer.

    And other students from low-income backgrounds find it difficult to understand even the financial requirements Yale’s aid policies commit them to. Important details regarding their obligations are often masked by the use of sweeping terms like “no-loan policy.”

    Yale widely publicizes the fact that the $3,200 self-help portion of a student’s financial aid package can be met by working only a few hours per week at the University’s student wages. Some students say that they enjoy the benefits of having an on-campus job — the extra spending money, the feeling of financial independence, the relationships forged with faculty and administrators. “I prefer to feel financially independent to the extent that I can afford to buy coffee, and I would feel uncomfortable if my external expenses were entirely covered by the University,” Friedmann says.

    But much less attention is drawn to the $2,900 student income contribution expected to come from a summer job. Many students have had trouble making the combined sum on their own. So they decided to borrow what they needed.

    Chowdhery is one of them. “When I graduate, I’ll have about $16,000 in loans,” she says. That way, Chowdhery adds, she might not be able to go abroad over spring break, but she can go out to dinner with her friends and order more than a glass of water.

    “I traded taking out loans for a quality of life and not feeling insecure about never having any money,” she says.

    According to institutional data, fewer students find themselves having to turn to loans. But while the percentage of students graduating in debt has dropped almost every year since Yale reformed its financial aid policies in 2005, the average debt burden of students who have taken out loans rose for the class of 2012, due to increased financial expectations faced by students, according to Caesar Storlazzi, the director of Student Financial Services.

    While Storlazzi adds that financial literacy modules are being discussed by Yale administrators, no concrete decisions have been made.

    A recent survey of 652 students conducted by the News shows that only 16 percent of students on financial aid find the application process very clear, and only 32 percent said they found it even somewhat clear. Most Yale students are expected to earn $6,100 per year between term-time and summer contributions, but several lower-income students we spoke to believed when they were admitted that they would have no financial obligations.

    In detailed conversations, students talked about surprise bills and unclear charges. Chowdhery, who is on full financial aid, had an outside scholarship during her freshman year and currently works 10 hours per week. But it hasn’t been enough.

    Abhinav Nayar ’15, a student from India, described a particularly confusing episode involving Yale’s financial aid office. In his freshman year, his financial aid award included the cost of insurance through Yale Health. Figuring he would save money in his second year, Nayar signed up for a cheaper Indian medical insurer. Upon learning that he had outside insurance, however, Student Financial Services reduced Nayar’s award by the cost of Yale health insurance. Instead of saving money, Nayar had wasted hundreds of dollars.

    While they may have gotten 5s on their AP Calculus tests, many new students of limited means have little idea how to take charge of their personal finances in a way that wealthier students often do not have to.

    Summer: All Work and Low Pay

    Though they’re away from Yale, students on full financial aid cannot consider summer to be simply a vacation. They are expected to earn $2,900 over those 14 weeks. Many therefore seek paid internships. Lacking the connections and time of their higher-income peers, students on extensive financial aid have a harder time seeking and applying to better opportunities.

    Applying for a fellowship to cover the costs of an unpaid internship or other summer activity is always an option, but many students from lower-income backgrounds cite several obstacles they have faced in attaining those fellowships.

    Two years ago, during the fellowship application cycle, Stewart was dealing with her disabled father’s failing health and the loss of their farm in Alma, Ark., which meant she had to lend major financial support to her family. The fellowship application process was competitive, and it required research and planning that back then, she says, she did not have the time for.

    Because she has not held an internship during her Yale career, Stewart feels behind her peers in the job search she is going through this semester as a graduating senior. She spent her first two summers during college keeping her family’s farm running until the business went under in December 2011. “What am I going to say to employers when they ask about my blank summers?” she asks herself. “Do I say, ‘Look I come from a very poor family, and we were trying to keep our farm afloat?’ No. I don’t want to lay my family’s problems bare to someone who is going to hire me.”

    Stewart covered her student income contribution using loans instead of summer job earnings.

    When she graduates, she will be in thousands of dollars’ worth of debt.

    Those students who do devote their summers to a paid job find that making the money they need can be demanding. At the end of his freshman year, Dalton Carr ’15 found he had spent nearly $2,000. Between Yale bills and the costs he incurred living on campus, he knew he would need to make some serious money. At that point, though, he didn’t have much choice but to go back to the “dangerous” job he held the summer after he graduated from high school, a $10 per hour position in the oil industry.

    Carr has spent the past two summers working at a refinery and an oil rig. It’s not fun, but it pays pretty well: Each summer, Dalton says, he netted around $2,500. That did leave another $400 to make up for — and, he says, he cut back to adjust for that amount.

    * * *

    Over the past several years, Yale administrators have made an unprecedented commitment of resources toward recruiting and welcoming lower-income students. “It’s not that the spirit wasn’t willing earlier,” President Levin told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2008. “But now, the pocketbook is deeper.”

    As deep as the pocketbook might be, there’s still a long way to go to before students from lower-income backgrounds get to live the same Yale experience as their higher-income counterparts.

    Those students don’t have a problem working hard, they say. “But it would be nice to be able to get out of that,” Carr says. “To be able to look for more productive things.”

    Arielle Stambler contributed reporting.