Yale Daily News

It seems to me that a tour request from a local public school should not even be going to the same e-mail account as a tour request from the general public, let alone go unresolved for weeks.

Yale should focus on helping New Haven improve the quality of its public schools and the values espoused by parents in New Haven's neighborhoods. If every school were run like Amistad Academy, you'd have plenty more applicants from New Haven.

Also, the premise of this article supposes that kids want to attend college in their home town. More often than not, highly qualified kids would like to leave the place of their upbringing to experience a new setting as part of their higher education.

All of those things aside, a spot in Yale College should not be given to anyone who won't survive academically. Just like everyone else, New Haven students need to show they'll be able to swim with the sharks in Yale's pond, or else they may have wasted someone else's opportunity.

"Of a half-dozen guidance counselors from New Haven public schools interviewed by the News, three — all of whom were from magnet or specialized schools — had not heard of Yale’s financial aid reforms."

Uh, so Yale is on the hook for these counselors not knowing the FA policies at the major university a few blocks away? Doesn't that fact say at least as much about them as it does about Yale? And can we linger on the question of how many of their students are actually prepared for Yale? Don't get me wrong: access to higher education is an urgent national issue, but that obviously doesn't mean that every high school senior, regardless of their training and ability, should be admitted to Yale. I look forward to a day that's different for kids in New Haven, but the implication that the Admissions Office is negligent is the wrong angle. Is spending limited resources of time, ebergy, and money on recruiting in New Haven public schools a cost-effective way to honor an admirable (and inarguable) institutional commitment to racial and socioeconomic diversity? Are we doing everything we can to improve the neighborhood in which we live (even if for that's only 40 months over 4 years for 5300 Yalies)? Are tutoring programs run through Dwight Hall doing as much as we'd like to think they are? There are better questions to ask about these issues, YDN, than you posed here.

Wow! If local admission counselors are so clueless that they don't about financial aid policies at local universities, you really have to wonder how well equipped they are and how well advised local kids are. It's not as if the information is secret -- its a webclick away and has been in the media. Isn't it their job to be knowledgeable?

Shame on the local guidance counsellors! If they are uninformed about Yale's financial aid policies, or about how to arrange an Admissions tour, they are simply not paying attention or doing their job. Simply reading the Yale Daily News, or the Weekly Bulletin & Calendar would keep them up on the recent developments, and exploring Yale's web site (rather than dialing the same phone number over and over) would help them figure out whom to call or email.

Yet another opportunity for local students to visit Yale is the Yale Book Awards program, sponsored by the Yale Club of New Haven and the AYA. Each year a promising junior from each of the 40+ high schools in and around the city are awarded a book prize and brought to campus for a ceremony, a presentation by current students, lunch in a residential college, and campus tours.

Why should locals get any special treatment?
It's New Haven that benefits from Yale, not vice versa.

I think in the bigger picture, this author should also be considering the number of students from surrounding areas like West Haven/North Haven/Fair Haven (the "Greater New Haven area"), many of whom come from even less well-off backgrounds than students in New Haven. Saying Yale should recruit more people just from New Haven is like saying Columbia should recruit more people just from Manhattan (and not the rest of the boroughs).

The laziness exemplified by these guidance counselors is a clear indication of how deteriorated the public school system has become. Here they are in Yale's backyard passively waiting for someone to do all the work that they are hired to do, while plenty of Yalies from public schools in far-flung states, myself included, still managed to attend a local info session or to locate a fascinating little website called www.yale.edu. Is this the new age we live in, where government or our institutions have to do all of the work for you?

Yale needs to do more to attract students from New Haven. It is more socially and environmentally sustainable to have students come from areas that are closer, rather than areas that are farther away. In the early 1900s, a quarter of the Yale freshman class came from New Haven.

Yale should definitely stop recruiting only the wealthy from Arab countries and focus more on lower income families within the United States.

If they're qualified, by all means, eat 'em up.

IF

Keep in mind that the number of new haven students the article mentions matriculating each year (somewhere below 14) is actually higher than the number of matriculants each year that come from some entire states. The admissions office has made it quite clear that they already give a preference to local applicants, so i don't think that's really a big issue. However, the fact that school counselors don't know about college financial aid policies in general is something that should definitely change, and if Yale could help do that, it would be doing everyone a great service!

#7 Fair Haven is in New Haven. Special treatment should'nt be given to anyone.Let the students earn the right to go to Yale or any other college. The well connected should not be admitted without merit.(Bush)

Those who have been involved with Yale long enough are well aware of the large number of efforts -- run both by Yale and among Yale's students -- to provide outreach to surrounding high schools. New Haven students can be mentored by Yale students, participate in a number of extracurricular opportunities organized by Yalies, and even take classes at Yale and receive Yale credit for no charge. Yale and its students want to work with area schools -- articles such as this merely highlight individual cases of miscommunication or outright incompetence among school counselors and are in the minority.

As a poor kid from the south who attended Yale undergrad in the 90s, I did my own research about colleges when I was in high school. I certainly was not going to leave such an important matter up to the counselor.

As many have said on this post, how is it possible that local high school counselors do not know about Yale's financial aid policy? Isn't that their job? Unlike 20 years ago, all of this information is on the web. How about this as a simple admissions test? If you, the high school student, do not have the drive and initiative to find out about your target school's financial aid policy, then you probably should not be admitted.

This article is dead-on. Those New Haveners who do attend Yale are almost always high-income Hopkins graduates from the Westville and East Rock neighborhoods whose parents teach or work at Yale.

Certainly, especially those of us who live along Congress Avenue, Dixwell Avenue, and the Boulevard.

Actually, New Haven guidance counselors are, for the most part, very well informed about Yale activities. They have helped their students participate in a wide variety of joint activities and classes. This is from my personal experience with the New Haven public school system, not an assumption or a generalization. Mrs. Puchi was misquoted in the comment regarding tours and admissions, and I am sure it will be corrected in a future article. It is thanks to help from counselors like her that New Haven public school students have learned about and participated in Yale-New Haven partnership classes and educational programs, as well as visiting campus for programs like Eli Days.

@#7:

FYI, New Haven isn't like New York City. It is largely surrounded by affluent small towns. Fair Haven is a neighborhood in New Haven. North Haven is a comfortable suburb. While East Haven and West Haven are not the wealthiest, I would argue that regions of serious poverty exist only in New Haven. My point is that if you are looking to use local populations to improve socioeconomic diversity at Yale, your primary target should be New Haven proper. If this was a real priority, Yale might consider investing somehow in the educational improvement of New Haven's elementary and high schools; unfortunately by the time colleges application season hits, Yale is far out of reach for most of these kids.

Andrew G -- good point; that being said, the article's comparison with yesteryear (wherein 93 of Yale's 838 freshmen in 1933 came from New Haven) is -- I'm sure -- also largely the result of students who lived in New Haven but attended private, rather than public, schools. It would be interesting to see data that breaks down this 1933 statistic based on the type of school attended.

It's always in Yales best interest to have a Bd.of Ed stealing the kids blind
I can name name and incidents that will make even Calhoun spin in his grave
The Law Firm that you all bow before in New Haven still has it's hands in the kids pie
if they achieve by some miraculous St.Judes Novena ,they just can't afford it
And they might just speak up about things like University properties,Hospital expansion, Union objection,control

I don't see this specifically as a minority/low-income student issue or specifically as a New Haven public school issue. I see it as a much broader accessibility issue. The perception is there that high achieving middle- or working-class New Haven County (East Haven, West Haven, Wallingford, Meriden, etc.) students aren't welcome at Yale (or other Ives, frankly). I wonder how many of the recipients of the Yale Book awards apply and are offered admission to Yale?
I don't know Yale's specific policies, but I know most Ivies and other highly competitive colleges and universities have significant national and even global outreach programs to recruit their desired applicant pools. Why not a program that pairs undergraduates and/or alums with local schools to encourage high-achieving students to apply to Yale and other Ivies?

I think we should target locals with the harpoon guns mounted on our baller yachts.

Hahahahahahahahaha

To be fair (esp. #22), Yale has more students from CT than any state except perhaps CA, NY, and MA ...

I think it definitely IS a "minority/lower-income student" issue ...

Hopkins kids don't forget to apply to Yale ...

"Brenzel said he felt badly for this mix-up."

Felt badly? Were his hands numb?

If this is at all representative of the current state of English instruction at Yale, maybe New Haven's public school kids are better off looking elsewhere.

This article makes no mention of the honors program at Wilbur Cross High School. 11th and 12th grade students in this program who receive some minimum score on their PSATs (not sure what the cut-off is)are able to take Yale undergraduate courses as part of their curriculum - for FREE. This is a wonderful entre for them. Many of these students go on to attend Yale and other Ivy League level schools.

As for the comment about all New Haven public school students being on the Yale campus at some point - I'm sure this is true - all come on field trips to the museums and to concerts and events.

Guess what?? Not everybody lives to attend Yale. Get over yourselves.

Yale should definitely target locals.

After all, locals have been targeting Yale for decades.

Yale should not target townies.