The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University.

The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Comment on this article

Yale and the Poor
July/August 2004

Y: Recently, Harvard announced that attendance will be free to undergraduates whose family income is $40,000 or less. What was your reaction?

L: I have mixed feelings. There’s no doubt that it’s attractive not to place too large a burden on low-income families. But the support Yale gives to the lowest-income families is very substantial. For most students with family incomes below $30,000 the required parental contribution is less than $500 a year. Below $40,000, most contribute less than $1,500. So I wonder whether it is in fact a step forward to say, “Now it’s free.” In my view, families ought to have a stake, however small, in their children’s education.

Y: How many students would the policy affect at Yale?

L: About 500 if income is the sole criterion, although some of the families reporting low incomes have substantial assets. They contribute much more.

Y: So it wouldn’t be a big financial sacrifice for Yale.

L: It wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive. It’s a question of what’s the right policy. I have a task force reviewing our current policies this summer.

One reason for our recent change in the early admission program was to help those seeking financial aid. Previously, an early application was binding on the student—if you applied early you had to commit to attending if admitted. This rendered it impossible for a student to be admitted to one institution early, hold on to the offer of financial aid, and then compare it with the offers made by other institutions in April. It was clear from the data that the proportion of students applying early who sought financial aid was significantly lower than among those who applied later. Under our new non-binding policy, we saw a substantial increase in early applicants seeking financial aid this year.

Y: According to Yale’s Office of Institutional Research, Yale College tuition almost doubled in real dollars from 1981 to 1998. But the proportion of undergraduates getting financial aid only rose from 37 percent to 41 percent. Does this trouble you?

L: No. Tuition did nearly double over this period, but the average disposable income of families rose by nearly 50 percent. And our financial aid formulas calculate what a family can afford to pay, regardless of the level of tuition. As tuition increases from year to year, a parent’s contribution does not increase unless the family’s economic circumstances have improved.

Y: What is Yale’s track record with poor students?

L: Bill Bowen, the former president of Princeton, has found that, at Yale and other highly selective schools, the proportion of students from families in the lowest 25 percent of incomes is about 11 percent. Bowen also shows dramatic progress in recent years. We have made this steady progress while keeping the financial statement separate from the admissions folder, and I think that is a good thing.

Y: What about stipends for graduate and professional students? Some Yale officials think this is a more serious problem than aid for low-income undergrads.

L: It is a serious problem for some of the professional schools, though not all of them. In PhD programs we fully fund every student. Students in schools where most graduates earn good incomes, like law, medicine, and management, don’t get much grant aid—there are a lot of loans given, and they are repaid because the graduates are able to overcome the debt burdens.

But in the schools where there’s a high likelihood that the graduates won’t earn high incomes—divinity, nursing, art, music, architecture, drama, and, to some extent, forestry and environmental studies—the average debt burdens vary from $30,000 to $60,000 upon graduation. Some graduates have six-figure debt burdens. In those lower-income professions, that is a tremendous strain. We should do better on financial aid at those schools. When we launch our next capital campaign, this will be a major emphasis.

Y: Also, some graduate and professional students can have their loans forgiven, some cannot.

L: We have loan forgiveness programs in law and management for graduates who go into public service. These are good programs, but they only work in schools where the fraction going into public service is low. Otherwise, it’s just the equivalent of giving grant aid in the first place.

Why would you give a loan to an artist and forgive it, instead of just giving her a stipend while she’s here? It would be far better to increase the endowments of the schools so they can generate more financial aid in the first place. If we are to train people and prepare them to succeed in their fields, it would be good if they weren’t burdened with having to take second jobs outside their professions after graduation.  

©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu