The Segregation that My Classes Decry
In fiction author David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College, he suggests that the real point of an education is to learn how to switch yourself out of your “default setting,” which is “the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.” For Wallace, to be educated to be able to consider other options; it’s the ability to pull a Humans-of-New-York and consider that the person who passes you on the sidewalk has a story more complicated than anything you could come up with on your own.
This is the education that I expected Yale to offer. I wanted to spend four years collecting nuanced vignettes about being alive in 2015, vignettes that I could draw on whenever I was tempted to generalize about what it meant to be black or Californian or Brazilian or low-income or any other category of person. I knew that my state school, University of Virginia, was chock full of the Soul-Cycling, Sweet-Green-eating, needlepoint-belt-wearing students that I had seen at the Episcopalian Church, on the soccer field and at the summer camps sponsored by the community center, and I chose Yale because I thought immersing myself in a “diverse” student body would help me de-naturalize my status quo. I thought that extracurriculars like a cappella and theater would let me intersect with people who were unfamiliar to me without characterizing anyone as Other. I thought that the dining halls would host a cross-section of the student body.
But I didn’t consider that six to midnight rehearsals would be impossible for students who had non-negotiable shifts with Yale Catering. And I didn’t consider that the prohibitive cost of the meal plan would empty the dining halls of potential friends, collaborators, and role models. I envisioned Yale as the last bastion of meritocracy, a hermetically sealed utopia where your choices are informed only by aspiration and ambition. And when I would return home to McLean, Virginia, for break, my dad would elaborate on this hyperbole by constantly referring to college as “a four-year pass from society.” I’m shocked that I’ve spent two years thinking that this catchphrase was adorable without realizing that this only describes a Yale experience without financial aid. Because as someone who pays full tuition here, I am insulated from logistics and their consequences. For example, when deadlines for first papers and fellowship applications were colliding in February, when I thought that my cognitive bandwidth was shriveling in the miasma of stress, I could still tell myself that even if I missed a deadline this time around, I’d still be able to house and feed myself for the duration of whatever internship chose me. And when I missed the deadline for opting out of the Yale health care plan, I didn’t have to change the number of times that I went to BNatural as a result.
Financial aid at Yale reproduces the kind of economic segregation that so many of my classes decry. Our college is supposed to be an exercise in constructing your own rubric of values, choosing what to do and who to do it with using something other than the logic of capitalism. And in a way that deeply undermines Yale’s reputation as a place of learning, the current financial aid requirements deny students the chance to do that kind of thinking for themselves.
This is the education that I expected Yale to offer. I wanted to spend four years collecting nuanced vignettes about being alive in 2015, vignettes that I could draw on whenever I was tempted to generalize about what it meant to be black or Californian or Brazilian or low-income or any other category of person. I knew that my state school, University of Virginia, was chock full of the Soul-Cycling, Sweet-Green-eating, needlepoint-belt-wearing students that I had seen at the Episcopalian Church, on the soccer field and at the summer camps sponsored by the community center, and I chose Yale because I thought immersing myself in a “diverse” student body would help me de-naturalize my status quo. I thought that extracurriculars like a cappella and theater would let me intersect with people who were unfamiliar to me without characterizing anyone as Other. I thought that the dining halls would host a cross-section of the student body.
But I didn’t consider that six to midnight rehearsals would be impossible for students who had non-negotiable shifts with Yale Catering. And I didn’t consider that the prohibitive cost of the meal plan would empty the dining halls of potential friends, collaborators, and role models. I envisioned Yale as the last bastion of meritocracy, a hermetically sealed utopia where your choices are informed only by aspiration and ambition. And when I would return home to McLean, Virginia, for break, my dad would elaborate on this hyperbole by constantly referring to college as “a four-year pass from society.” I’m shocked that I’ve spent two years thinking that this catchphrase was adorable without realizing that this only describes a Yale experience without financial aid. Because as someone who pays full tuition here, I am insulated from logistics and their consequences. For example, when deadlines for first papers and fellowship applications were colliding in February, when I thought that my cognitive bandwidth was shriveling in the miasma of stress, I could still tell myself that even if I missed a deadline this time around, I’d still be able to house and feed myself for the duration of whatever internship chose me. And when I missed the deadline for opting out of the Yale health care plan, I didn’t have to change the number of times that I went to BNatural as a result.
Financial aid at Yale reproduces the kind of economic segregation that so many of my classes decry. Our college is supposed to be an exercise in constructing your own rubric of values, choosing what to do and who to do it with using something other than the logic of capitalism. And in a way that deeply undermines Yale’s reputation as a place of learning, the current financial aid requirements deny students the chance to do that kind of thinking for themselves.
