Negotiating the Bureaucracy
Yale Financial Services is a bureaucracy. That’s obvious, everyone knows that. Everyone expects a little bit of coldness from a bureaucracy.
The deadlines that YFS imposes are overbearing for students with first-generation parents or students who are among the first in their families to go to the university. Getting together the documents, negotiating the bureaucracy, explaining the process to parents who can’t be the ones explaining things to you is an additional burden that occurs during what is for many an extremely trying part of the year—essays, midterms, finals, and taxes. Papers upon papers.
My experience with YFS has been trying. Most recently, I had already arrived on campus for my senior year this fall when my family back home received a letter telling them that I would be kicked out of school for failure to pay if I didn’t come up with the entire amount of tuition, even though I had filed my documents with Yale months before. A bureaucratic snag, a mismatch between a revised 1040-A that and what Yale had on file electronically, threatened to jeopardize me. It was resolved, though only a few days before my deadline.
The deadlines that YFS imposes are overbearing for students with first-generation parents or students who are among the first in their families to go to the university. Getting together the documents, negotiating the bureaucracy, explaining the process to parents who can’t be the ones explaining things to you is an additional burden that occurs during what is for many an extremely trying part of the year—essays, midterms, finals, and taxes. Papers upon papers.
My experience with YFS has been trying. Most recently, I had already arrived on campus for my senior year this fall when my family back home received a letter telling them that I would be kicked out of school for failure to pay if I didn’t come up with the entire amount of tuition, even though I had filed my documents with Yale months before. A bureaucratic snag, a mismatch between a revised 1040-A that and what Yale had on file electronically, threatened to jeopardize me. It was resolved, though only a few days before my deadline.
