Passing as a Yale Student
I am a freshman on full financial aid. A private scholarship I got during junior year of high school—and negotiations with the financial aid office last April—cover my student income contribution. I don’t have to work a job to pay for my education, and I am deeply, penny-pinchingly conscious of how I spend every free hour my scholarship money has bought.
I’ve been able to take on a (perhaps excessively) ambitious course-load of upper-level math and physics electives, and sign up for extracurricular commitments that take up more hours a week than some student jobs. I’ve enjoyed my time here immensely—the time I’ve spent working on psets or speeches instead of several jobs, on thinking about Lie algebras or Max Weber instead of about money. It’s hard to express in words how much joy and relief I feel that all the amazing experiences I’ve had at Yale have not come at the cost of my family’s financial security.
There’s an intoxicating sense of legitimacy that comes with living the Yale experience that was promised (and the older—whiter, wealthier—Yale the better), learning printmaking on a centuries-old press, listening to a lecture by a former Treasury secretary, spending my days thinking about abstractions, putting on a suit and talking about politics in an oak-paneled room. Like reading Nietzsche as a low-income Jewish Chinese American woman with not much upper body strength, it feels empowering and maybe even a little subversive to claim Yale—and reclaim Old Yale—as my own.
But I know that I’ve had access to Yale’s extraordinary opportunities not as a low-income Asian American but as someone who could appear not to be: in not having to work, in being “ambiguously” mixed race, I’ve been able to pass as the white, upper-middle class student who can take all that Yale has on offer.
When I look around the YPU, the classic Yale extracurricular that requires an extensive investment of time (and often of money) to really get something out of it, from the hours-long weekly debates to the socials and Mory’s toasting and Yorkside pizza, I see how much time has a value and how much it has a price. There are wealthy, usually white students who pay it without a second thought, and there are low-income students who pay dearly to approximate an experience that is richer (in more than one way). A barrier of time and money walls off and drains the vitality of this institution that should be a center of campus politics from the racial and socioeconomic realities of the student body it ought to serve. I’ve been lucky enough to have a private scholarship that boosts me over, that allows me to spend my time at Yale as if I could afford its price.
Of course I am thankful to have won a generous scholarship. I am thankful to have been able to negotiate a grant that meets my needs. I am thankful to be an outlier offered standing room in the halls of power. And I am thankful to have the experience promised in the admission brochures and not the one implied in the footnotes to the “expected contribution” chart.
But I’d much rather be thankful to a Yale that earns its thanks equally, in which its promises are freely kept and not hard-won, in which my education didn’t have to be negotiated and privatized, in which time doesn’t cost more for those who have the least ability to pay.
I should not be passing as a Yale student; I should be proud to be one.
I’ve been able to take on a (perhaps excessively) ambitious course-load of upper-level math and physics electives, and sign up for extracurricular commitments that take up more hours a week than some student jobs. I’ve enjoyed my time here immensely—the time I’ve spent working on psets or speeches instead of several jobs, on thinking about Lie algebras or Max Weber instead of about money. It’s hard to express in words how much joy and relief I feel that all the amazing experiences I’ve had at Yale have not come at the cost of my family’s financial security.
There’s an intoxicating sense of legitimacy that comes with living the Yale experience that was promised (and the older—whiter, wealthier—Yale the better), learning printmaking on a centuries-old press, listening to a lecture by a former Treasury secretary, spending my days thinking about abstractions, putting on a suit and talking about politics in an oak-paneled room. Like reading Nietzsche as a low-income Jewish Chinese American woman with not much upper body strength, it feels empowering and maybe even a little subversive to claim Yale—and reclaim Old Yale—as my own.
But I know that I’ve had access to Yale’s extraordinary opportunities not as a low-income Asian American but as someone who could appear not to be: in not having to work, in being “ambiguously” mixed race, I’ve been able to pass as the white, upper-middle class student who can take all that Yale has on offer.
When I look around the YPU, the classic Yale extracurricular that requires an extensive investment of time (and often of money) to really get something out of it, from the hours-long weekly debates to the socials and Mory’s toasting and Yorkside pizza, I see how much time has a value and how much it has a price. There are wealthy, usually white students who pay it without a second thought, and there are low-income students who pay dearly to approximate an experience that is richer (in more than one way). A barrier of time and money walls off and drains the vitality of this institution that should be a center of campus politics from the racial and socioeconomic realities of the student body it ought to serve. I’ve been lucky enough to have a private scholarship that boosts me over, that allows me to spend my time at Yale as if I could afford its price.
Of course I am thankful to have won a generous scholarship. I am thankful to have been able to negotiate a grant that meets my needs. I am thankful to be an outlier offered standing room in the halls of power. And I am thankful to have the experience promised in the admission brochures and not the one implied in the footnotes to the “expected contribution” chart.
But I’d much rather be thankful to a Yale that earns its thanks equally, in which its promises are freely kept and not hard-won, in which my education didn’t have to be negotiated and privatized, in which time doesn’t cost more for those who have the least ability to pay.
I should not be passing as a Yale student; I should be proud to be one.
