For each other.

“I know that, even with a summer job, it won’t be enough to offset my step-dad being laid off. COVID-19 has led to many families being laid off which affects many students at Yale, specifically those who receive partial financial aid and are expected to pay the same amount for tuition that they’ve paid every year. The SIC makes Yale even more inaccessible, especially during an international pandemic, forcing low income students to sacrifice precious time to work to remain on campus.”

“My first year I received enough scholarships from both my high school and local community to not have to have worked a job which was amazing as I got to spend my first year exploring and fearlessly participating in all the extracurriculars I was genuinely interested in. For me this Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“Rather than spending most of my weeks planning around classes, talks, club meetings, or social gatherings, I explicitly schedule my days around my 19 hours of work every week in order to meet Yale’s SIC.”

“Rather than spending most of my weeks planning around classes, talks, club meetings, or social gatherings, I explicitly schedule my days around my 19 hours of work every week in order to meet Yale’s SIC. It is difficult to justify taking advantage of Yale’s resources when I could instead be Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“I did not have to worry about paying off debt, the Student Income Contribution, or supporting my family. This is what enables me to experience only the anxiety brought by lost opportunities for career growth and social life.”

“I was able to go home to my family in rural Maine, where my parents still had their jobs and the pandemic was relatively muted. Financially, things were stable and it was actually nice to have time with my parents and my siblings who also came home. But during an Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“While I know I gained useful skills from my job, I really do wish I was able to have spent my time doing other things like exploring more extracurriculars, building relationships with my peers, or even spent more time taking care of my health with sleep and exercise.”

This summer, I am doing an internship with a local charter school network; it was supposed to have been a paid internship, but now with the pandemic and economic downturn, it is unpaid. I was fortunate enough to be awarded a fellowship for a separate research project that I am Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“To Yale, the SIC is an expense they can distribute to everyone in a couple weeks — but to me, that money is educational expenses, and that money is time that I could be studying. The resulting worry and lack of time has definitely prevented me from reaching my full potential as a scholar.”

From March through May, my mom, who is a domestic housekeeper, lost all her clients due to fears about the COVID-19 crisis. The majority of them did not offer to continue to pay her at all despite the intense vulnerability and exposure my mom would face when she eventually returned Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“Getting rid of the student income contribution would give students wider latitude with how they spend their DSA money, and encourage students to perform even more meaningful work on campus as well.”

As a first generation college student, I’ve seen firsthand how much some of my FGLI peers have struggled with getting a job after graduation. For many without connections, the process can take up to 5 months. I believe expanding the DSA to post graduation would give students a much needed Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

“Although I worked a campus job that may soon be nonexistent due to the precarious nature of the fall semester, it alone is not enough to cover the SIC and my mother has been working seven-day weeks and twelve-hour shifts for the past two years to make sure that I won’t have to deal with student loan debt in the future.”

Although I worked a campus job that may soon be nonexistent due to the precarious nature of the fall semester, it alone is not enough to cover the SIC and my mother has been working seven-day weeks and twelve-hour shifts for the past two years to make sure that I Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago

I am fortunate enough to have most of my tuition covered by Yale and an outside scholarship to pay for my Student Share which means that I have received more gift aid than the billed expenses. However, none of this aid has ever been made available to me to put towards textbooks, travel, or other personal matters, even though Yale claims that the Student Share can be reduced by outside scholarships. Instead, in the summer of 2019, I worked in a lab.

With students located all over the world and coming from different financial backgrounds, how did Yale expect each student to have an equal experience during the COVID-19 pandemic? I am among the fortunate few to have fast internet access, but this wasn’t the case for many students—more in-class questions were Read more…

By Students Unite Now, ago