Since early last week, campus has been rocked by intensified discourse around divestment, as hundreds of Yale students and community members have protested the University’s investments in military weapons manufacturers in light of Israel’s continued war against Hamas in Gaza. 

These protests included an encampment at Beinecke Plaza beginning on Friday, April 19. Early in the morning on Monday, April 22, Yale police arrested 48 student protesters for trespassing on Beinecke Plaza and cleared out the encampments. The protesters then moved to occupy the intersection of Grove and College Streets, which New Haven police closed to traffic. At around 5 p.m. on Monday, the protesters relocated to Cross Campus, where dozens of students remained to sleep on Tuesday night. 

Executive Director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life Uri Cohen wrote in an email to the News that this past week “has been more difficult for Jewish students than any week at Yale in recent memory.”

Cohen added that the Slifka Center hosted a community gathering on Sunday night, which lasted around an hour. Cohen stated that the goal was to give students “a place to gather,” adding that students were united in “a shared sense of concern for the Yale Jewish community.”

On Sunday, April 21, while protesters were still occupying Beinecke Plaza, Chabad at Yale released a statement on “antisemitic violence during campus protests.” This statement described a “hostile and“dangerous confrontation for Jewish students” on Friday night. 

The statement called upon Yale to enforce University policy fairly, acknowledge the alleged injury of a Chabad leader and formally declare that Jewish students at Yale must not be threatened or attacked. 

Elijah Bacal ’27, a leader of Yale Jews for Ceasefire — a coalition of Jewish students demanding a ceasefire in Gaza — said that the perceived narrative of protests being anti-Jewish and contributing to anti-Jewish sentiments on campus was “harmful to everyone.” 

Danya Dubrow-Compaine ’25, a co-leader of Jews for Ceasefire, said that protests like those this past week — as opposed to what she called the “let’s sit down and talk about it” mindset — are a “critically important” part of movement-building.

She added, however, that she realizes that protests can be divisive and might not always leave room for engaging deeply with nuanced feelings. Still, she felt that this week’s demonstrations have been “very open.”

“We’ve had teach-ins, we’ve had guest speakers, we’ve had art, we’ve had letter-writing,” she said. “I think we’ve done a really good job of carrying the weight of a lot of people’s emotions and juggling it.”

Bacal said that he and other members of J4C led the singing of Jewish songs of support at the protest. These songs included their original Hebrew translation of “We Shall Not be Moved,” a song that has been sung several times per day at protests. 

On Monday afternoon, Dubrow-Compaine and members of J4C organized a “Seder in the Streets” on Cross Campus, calling on Yale and the United States government to “stop starving Gaza” and to “stop arming Israel.” 

Dubrow-Compaine, who called herself a Jewish person who cares “very deeply” about the Jewish community but has strong ideological disagreements with many mainstream Jewish spaces, said she has experienced struggles with what she sees as a “decentering of Palestine” in Jewish discourse.

“It feels really powerful that we were able to both celebrate an important Jewish ritual and holidays while also making it about Palestine and putting the focus there,” Dubrow-Compaine said of Monday’s Seder in the Streets. Dubrow-Compaine added that this allowed her to not have to choose “between celebrating [her] Judaism and supporting Palestinians.”

Bacal described Passover as a story of liberation, which he said is in alignment with his personal mission and what he sees as the mission of the protests. 

Approximately 125 students attended Monday evening’s Seder.

Yossi Moff ’27, another Jewish student, told the News that while he “will not judge the Judaism of [his] Jewish peers who are involved with Jews 4 Ceasefire,” their actions in the ongoing protests cause him “pain.” 

“Watching them take our tradition, our songs and our God and perform them in front of a predominantly non-Jewish crowd that is explicitly anti-Jewish hurts,” he said. 

Moff said that while he believes that many of the protesters do not harbor antisemitic views, he still feels the protests are anti-Jewish. He pointed to the protesters’ participation in the chant, “there is only one solution: intifada revolution” and display of posters featuring “convicted terrorist” Walid Daqqa as particularly distressing for Jewish students.

Daqqa was a Palestinian figure convicted of commanding a group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that kidnapped and murdered off-duty Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Daqqa, who recently died of cancer in captivity, is viewed by many Palestinians as a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israel.

The protesters first hung a poster commemorating Daqqa on April 17 and were still displaying it as of yesterday. 

In regards to “intifada revolution,” organizers have told the News that they have not approved of the use of this chant, or other chants that have been recited such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” at the protests, and provided a sheet of approved chants to corroborate this claim. Protesters have used both chants frequently throughout the protests.

In a statement to the News, an organizer and press liaison for the protests wrote that the organizers “condemn antisemitism in all forms” and “have prioritized building a peaceful and respectful protest environment.” 

“The demonstrations of the past week have been about building a world free from violence –– against Jews, Palestinians, and all other peoples,” she said. “That is why we will continue to sing about building a world from love, and why we will continue to demand divestment from military weapons.”

Four Jewish students interviewed by the News in addition to Moff said that the protests felt “anti-Jewish.” 

“Jewish students feel unsafe in a way that I’m not sure they ever have on campus, certainly a way that they haven’t since the immediate days following October 7,” said Abe Baker-Butler ’25. 

In his Sunday email, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein —  Yale’s Jewish Chaplain — cited two instances of Jewish pedestrians being subjected to verbal abuse. According to the email, Rubenstein and his family were called “fucking Jews” by passersby on Orange Street in November, and one visiting professor was told “die Zionist” in the past week.

Baker-Butler further added that he feels the University has not enforced policies equally, noting that the encampment on Beinecke Plaza was in “clear violation of many University rules.”

According to Baker-Butler, Yale administration did not allow Jewish students to build a ritual structure known as Sukkah on Cross Campus during Sukkot, a religious holiday that takes place in October; the News obtained earlier this month a September email exchange between Assistant Vice President for University Life Pilar Montalvo and the student requesting to build a Sukkah. Baker-Butler said that the University has created a “double standard” by waiting three days before clearing the encampment in Beinecke Plaza, adding that the University must “enforce rules even-handedly” if it wishes to create a “safe environment for all students.”

“I think that these protests have really crossed a line from being anti-zionist to being anti-semitic,” said Kira Berman ’25, President of Yale Friends of Israel, who also attended the pro-Israel protest on Saturday night.

Berman specifically noted that while she has felt physically safe, she also feels emotionally “unsafe, unwelcome and fearful.” Berman emphasized that the protests have “absolutely felt anti-Jewish.”

Berman added that many of her Jewish friends who weren’t planning to go home for Passover decided to leave “because they don’t feel comfortable on our campus right now.”

Israeli student Aaron Schorr ’24 told the News that while he views the protesters’ fight for “peace in the Middle East [as] a noble cause,” he feels it’s “not the only thing” the protests are advocating for.

“It is clear to me that some of the rhetoric at the protests has been blatantly antisemitic, illiberal and unbecoming of a movement that claims to speak for the universalist values of freedom and liberation,” Schorr said. 

Like Moff, both Berman and Schorr cited protesters’ use of chants calling for “intifada revolution” and display of the poster honoring Daqqa as particularly distressing. 

Eytan Israel ’26 told the News that he hopes the University will continue to de-escalate protests and protect the campus community. 

“It is imperative that Yale follow through on their policies both in order to protect the safety of those on campus and to show the Jewish students that there will be no possible way that escalation can go beyond the line,” he said.

Israel himself claimed that without intervention the protests could escalate to the level of protests at Columbia University, where Jewish students have been advised to leave campus by a community Rabbi who wrote to students that “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.” 

The Columbia Spectator reported that a group of 10 pro-Israel students counter-protesting Columbia’s pro-Palestine “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” experienced antisemitic incidents Saturday night, such as “death threats, antisemitic rhetoric, and stalking,” according to interviews with students and videos reviewed by the Spectator.

In an email to the Slifka community on Sunday evening signed on to by the Hillel Student Board, Cohen and Rubenstein wrote that the message to Columbia students “reverberates here,” but so far, they see Yale’s campus as safe for Jewish students.

“I think there has been cause for Jews on campuses across the country to feel unsafe … but as a Jewish student on [Yale’s] campus, that idea is not reflective at all of my experience,” said Bacal.

Bacal added that he has had conversations with Jewish community members who he disagrees with. However, Bacal emphasized that he continues to feel welcomed by Yale’s Jewish community even while disagreeing with some stances promoted by Slifka leadership and some other students.

Dubrow-Compaine said that she does not feel unsafe as a Jewish person on campus right now. 

However, she said that the feelings of Jewish students who do feel afraid right now are “valid.”

“What I mean by that is not that I share those feelings or that I think there is good reason to be afraid of these protesters who are my friends and who are constantly preaching messages of love and compassion and community,” Dubrow-Compaine said. “But I know that people have different emotions and different reactions to things based on different lived experiences.”

Bacal noted that he feels he is “straddling” different worlds, where he is both an activist and organizer for the pro-Palestine protests as well as an active member in Yale’s Jewish community.  

In their email, Cohen and Rubenstein described “existential conflict” within Yale’s Jewish community over the war that is “strain[ing] the possibility of mutual trust” such that students “feel betrayed by one another.”

“As you can see, I am struggling in the ways you all are – to neither exaggerate nor understate the significance of what is happening in our Yale community, to see it both on its own terms, and to discern patterns of antisemitism,” Rubenstein wrote.

The Jewish holiday of Passover will end after nightfall on Tuesday, April 30. 

Correction, April 24: This article has been updated to better describe Yale Jews for Ceasefire as “a coalition of Jewish students demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.”

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Last year’s Bulldog Days was the largest ever, with over admitted 1,400 students in attendance. This year’s event is slightly smaller, with just over 1,300 students coming to scope out Yale College this week. 

This year’s Bulldog Days is the third in-person iteration of the program since the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the three-day event, admitted students will have the opportunity to take part in 250 events, 150 of which are run by current students and student groups. 

“This is an amazing campus-wide effort,” Mark Dunn ’07, the senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said. “The scale of the operation and the number of people who need to be involved is pretty impressive. We just are so appreciative of how many students, faculty and staff continue to step up and really kind of roll out the red carpet for our admitted students.”

According to Dunn the downsizing of Bulldog Days from last year is “by design” and can be attributed to multiple factors, including that Yale admitted fewer applicants this year than last. The College admitted 2,146 students to the class of 2028, down 129 from the 2,275 students admitted to the class of 2027. 

Another reason that fewer potential Yalies are attending Bulldog Days this year is that they have opted to take part instead in Bulldog Saturday, a day-long alternative to Bulldog Days on April 20. During Bulldog Saturday admitted students and families will have the chance to visit the College and partake in activities during the weekend. This year is the first year since before the COVID-19 pandemic that the admissions office has offered Bulldog Saturday. According to Dunn, nearly 300 admitted students will visit campus for Bulldog Saturday this year.

This year’s Bulldog Days also comes amid a week of intense protest across campus, including the “Occupy Beinecke” sit-in, a Yale Police union rally and leaflet campaign and a hunger strike that began on April 13. 

While the weekday Bulldog Days programming will have a lower attendance than last year, the total number and percentage of admitted students coming to campus for April programming has increased. This year, roughly 1,600 students, or 75 percent of the admitted class, will attend Bulldog programming, whereas last Bulldog Days saw roughly 63 percent of the admitted class.

“There’s a level at which we reach capacity,” Dunn said. “In dining halls, or in terms of getting students to host. We made work last year, but this year we were all feeling like reducing the number a bit would just be a lot more comfortable.”

Of the 1,300 prefrosh who came to campus, 900 are staying with current students with whom they were connected by the admissions office. According to Dunn, 500 current students signed up to host a prefrosh. The remaining admitted students found their own accommodations.

“I had such a wonderful experience at Bulldog Days last year, so I wanted to pay it forward and host some prefrosh this year,” said Crawford Arnow ’27, whose suite is hosting three prefrosh. “I just want to do my part in sharing my love for Yale with prospective students.”

Among the most popular Bulldog Days events are the two student showcases in the Shubert Theatre on Monday and Tuesday evenings. Each performance will have about ten student groups performing each night, Dunn said.

This year’s Bulldog Days also is the first since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in higher education last June. While admissions officers involved in the application reading process will not have access to information about the racial makeup of the admitted class of 2028 until after all spots on the waitlist have been granted, other employees who do not read applications do have this information.

These employees were able to share racial demographic data about the admitted student class with Yale’s cultural centers, which run many popular Bulldog Days programs, according to Dunn. While access to information about students’ self-identified race may be useful to the cultural centers in directing their Bulldog Days outreach, Dunn “encourages everybody” to engage with the cultural centers’ programming.

As in years past, the admissions office hosted a Bulldog Days fly-in program, wherein costs of travel are covered or subsidized for domestic students who qualify. According to Dunn, more than 600 admitted students qualified for the fly-in program.

Travel coverage can range from a metro ticket from New York City to multi-stop flights from Hawaiʻi, Dunn said.

“We think it’s essential that all of our students have the chance to visit campus before they make their decision, especially students from lower income backgrounds, who are less likely to have visited before applying,” Dunn said. “It’s important to invest the money, the staff energy and the time into ensuring that they can do that. It’s quite an operation; it’s like we’re running a travel agency out of the admissions office.”

In the past, one of the biggest student concerns about Bulldog Days was the lack of swipe access granted to prefrosh, according to Chandler Houldin, senior assistant director in the admissions office and director of the Bulldog Days program.

While prefrosh are able to scan into residential college dates and dining halls, they do not have access to entryways. According to Houldin, this decision is to maximize the safety of both prefrosh and current students.

Yale’s acceptance rate for the class of 2028 was 3.7 percent, the lowest ever.

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The fund is composed of settlements from Yale and nine other elite universities in a lawsuit alleging that the consortium of schools was engaging in price-fixing behavior to limit need-based financial aid. Yale settled for $18.5 million in January but denied allegations of wrongdoing. Friday’s message came after the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted preliminary approval to the class action settlement. 

“If approved by the Court, the Settlements will provide cash payments to members of the Settlement Class who submit valid and timely claim forms later in the process,” according to the Financial Aid Antitrust Settlement website. “Payments for claims will vary depending on a number of factors. Assuming that about half of the 200,000 Settlement Class members submit timely claims (at a later date), and that the Court awards the attorneys’ fees and costs as requested, the average claimant will receive about $2,000 from these Settlements.”

In its preliminary approval, the court approved a class of students — called the settlement class — who are eligible to receive payments, according to a Friday message.

Any U.S. citizen who attended Yale College and received partial need-based financial aid from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2024 is a member of the settlement class and is therefore eligible to claim a portion of the $284 million.

Other members of the settlement class include partial need-based financial aid recipients since 2003 at the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke University, Georgetown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Notre Dame University, Rice University and Vanderbilt University. 

Domestic undergraduates who received partial need-based financial aid from Brown, Dartmouth and Emory University since 2004 are also eligible to receive payments, as are undergraduates who received partial financial aid from California Institute of Technology since 2019, or from Johns Hopkins University since 2021.

Members of the settlement class must “submit a valid and timely claim” in order to get money from the settlement fund, according to Friday’s message. 

The motion has only been approved preliminarily. Should the court issue a formal approval “several months from now,” all settlement class members will receive a claim form to complete, according to the website.

A University spokesperson declined the News’ request for further comment on the situation.

“Yale College’s financial aid offers meet the full financial need of each student, with none of the aid in the form of repayable loans,” a University spokesperson wrote in a statement shared with the News in January. “This settlement contains no admission that Yale did anything wrong but allows the university to avoid the cost and disruption of further litigation and to continue its work in making undergraduate education more affordable for more families.”

The court will hold a “fairness hearing” via phone call in July, wherein it will issue a further decision on this motion.

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The cohort joins the 709 applicants who were accepted via restrictive early action in December, as well as the 72 students who matched with Yale through the QuestBridge National College Match program. In total, of the 57,465 students who applied to join the class of 2028, 3.7 percent — or 2,146 students — were admitted, marking the lowest acceptance rate on record. The admitted class includes students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, two U.S. territories and 62 countries. 

The 3.7 percent acceptance rate for the class of 2028 is the lowest in Yale’s history, down 0.65 percentage points from last year’s 4.35 percent acceptance rate. The decrease continues a downward trend in acceptance rates that began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with applicants seeking admission to the class of 2024.

“The diverse range of strengths, ambitions, and lived experiences we saw in this year’s applicant pool was inspiring,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan wrote in a press release. “We gauge the success of our outreach efforts by these qualities, and not by the total number of applications. But it is heartening to see that Yale College continues to attract exceptionally promising students from all backgrounds.”

The class of 2028 applied amid a changing admissions landscape. They are the last group of students to apply in a test-optional admissions cycle. Yale announced in February that it would resume requiring test scores for applicants seeking a spot in the class of 2029. A News survey found that under a test-optional policy, students on financial aid were more likely to have omitted test scores from their Yale applications.

The cohort is also the first to be admitted to the University since the fall of affirmative action in June. This year, admissions officers did not have access to information about applicants’ self-identified race when evaluating them for admission. 

Admissions officers involved in the application reading process will have access to neither this information nor aggregate information about the racial makeup of the class of 2028 until after the admissions process has officially ended. According to Mark Dunn ’07, the senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, the admissions cycle will not be officially completed until the final applicants have been offered admission off of the waitlist.

“Because some first-year applicants will be offered a spot on Yale’s waiting list, the admissions office’s selection process will not be complete on March 28,” Dunn wrote in an email to the News. “We will continue to maintain safeguards to ensure that the admissions officers involved in the review and selection of candidates from the waitlist do not have access to any race or ethnicity data at either the individual or aggregate level.”

Earlier this year, the admissions office hired two new full-time employees, whose jobs are devoted exclusively to community outreach and partnerships. Because these officers are not involved in the application reading process, they have access to aggregate racial data about the class of 2028; however, they will not be able to publish this information until after the admissions cycle has officially ended.

Due to delays with the rollout of FAFSA, the admissions office also does not have information about the proportion of students in the admitted class who are eligible for Pell Grants. However, Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid Kari DiFonzo told the News earlier this week that this will not delay financial aid offers for admitted students.

Each year, around the time matriculating first-year students arrive on campus in the fall, the admissions office publishes a detailed profile of the class, that includes information about demographics like racial and socioeconomic background. Dunn said that the release of the profile of the class of 2028 will not change this year from previous years.

All newly admitted students will be invited to campus in April for Bulldog Days. This year’s Bulldog Days will be the third in-person iteration of the event since the pandemic.

Admitted students will have until May 1 to respond to their offer of admission.

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But rollout this year of the modified FAFSA is occurring on a months-delayed timeline, forcing many colleges to push back deadlines for students to respond to their offers of admission, and leaving many students to choose a college without final financial aid offers.

But federal delays will not affect Yale College’s ability to release initial financial aid offers to admitted students, according to Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid Kari DiFonzo. Come Thursday, when regular admission decisions are released, admitted students will receive an initial financial aid offer detailing the amounts their families are expected to contribute toward their Yale education, DiFonzo said. When FAFSA information becomes available, families will receive a follow-up financial aid package, specifying how much aid will come from Yale and how much will come from federal Pell Grants.

“There are many reasons why the process of completing a financial aid offer can take longer for some families, but, thankfully, the FAFSA delays are not impeding our ability to assess families’ need and package offers,” DiFonzo told the News. “The proportion of admitted students with completed financial aid offers at the time admissions decisions are released is very similar to last year.”

The goal of the FAFSA Simplification Act was to make the application for federal student aid as easy as possible, but rollout problems caused more harm than good, DiFonzo said.

In a normal year, the FAFSA form is released for families in October. This year, however, due to complications with system changes, the system did not launch until late December.

“Many families — those who were able to access the system — were able to complete the form in maybe 10 minutes or less,” DiFonzo said. “The problem has really been with the rollout. It came out much, much later than it should have. Even when it was introduced, it was intermittently available, and it was down for maintenance all the time.”

According to DiFonzo, when assembling a student’s financial aid package, Yale looks at the “full financial aid profile” of their family, using information from the student’s CSS profile, their FAFSA documents and their federal tax documents.

The Office of Undergraduate Financial Aid uses a process called “institutional methodology,” when determining a family’s financial aid package, DiFonzo explained. This allows financial aid officers to gauge a family’s financial need without access to FAFSA documents, using only information from their CSS profile.

Because of Yale’s robust financial aid program, the role of the FAFSA in the assembly of a financial aid offer is mainly to determine what amount of a family’s aid will come from federal dollars, DiFonzo said.

“What we do is we start with the total cost of attendance, and then subtract out the family share that we calculate, and then you are left with a student’s total need,” she said. “That total need can be thought of as a big bucket, one which is filled both with Yale financial aid dollars and federal financial aid dollars. So the role of the FAFSA is really just in figuring out how much of that need bucket is filled with federal aid versus institutional aid.”

Yale has the resources to meet 100 percent of every student’s demonstrated financial need, DiFonzo said; however, she added that the financial aid office counts on some portion of the aid given out being subsidized by federal dollars in the form of Pell Grants.

But because of Yale’s promise to meet all demonstrated need, it is possible to send out initial offers without FAFSA information detailing how much of their financial aid will come from Pell Grants. According to DiFonzo, the initial offers will be less about telling families exactly how much financial aid they will receive from Yale and more about making families aware of how much they should plan to pay for the following academic year.

“I feel strongly that students and families need as much time as possible to plan,” DiFonzo said. “If we wait until we’ve had the opportunity to review all of the FAFSAs, which likely won’t be until July, one or two months of a payment plan will have already passed. The bill will already have been posted. This way, at least families can start thinking about what their payment plans will look like.” 

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan echoed the importance of giving families as much time as possible to plan. 

Cost is typically the top concern for most admitted students, Quinlan told the News, so releasing these initial packages will give families ample time to process their aid packages and ask questions.

Despite a delayed and complicated rollout of FAFSA this year, the financial aid office is not making any adjustments to its timeline for returning students. There is an April 1 priority deadline for returning students to submit their financial aid applications.

DiFonzo said it is possible that financial aid packages for current students, which are scheduled to begin releasing in the coming weeks, might also be released without FAFSA information and adjusted later on.

Every financial aid package sent out to an incoming first-year student includes a cover letter from DiFonzo that explains information about Yale’s financial aid program and the contents of their aid packet. Historically, returning students’ aid packages do not include a similar letter.

However, DiFonzo said that due to this year’s FAFSA complications, returning students will also get a cover letter from the office along with their initial financial aid package detailing that there may be changes to their financial aid package once their FAFSA is reviewed on the delayed timeline.

These discrepancies between the financial aid package given in the coming weeks and those given when the FAFSAs are all processed may also occur for incoming students. 

Although the information on a student’s CSS Profile should align with that on their FAFSA form, DiFonzo said there are occasional discrepancies. In previous years, such discrepancies have been resolved by clarifying certain details with families before releasing their aid packages. 

But because this year’s FAFSA forms will be released after initial aid packages have already been sent out, if there is discrepant information between a student’s CSS Profile and their FAFSA, the office might have to make slight changes to a family’s financial aid offer, according to DiFonzo.

“We are making sure that, when we send out initial financial aid packages, we are saying clearly to students that this is not a final financial aid offer,” DiFonzo said. “Rather, it is a tentative offer, pending review of their FAFSA; if students qualify for federal aid, their Yale financial aid package might change. We want students to understand that they will get another letter later on, but their end result — the amount their family is expected to pay — will be the same.”

The Yale College Council has been campaigning for years for increased transparency from the financial aid office, according to YCC president Julian Suh-Toma ’25.

Suh-Toma said that, while he is happy with the office’s decision to communicate initial assessments to students as quickly as possible, he is worried about the possibility of packages shifting pending new information from FAFSA documents.

“This plan of action feels like the best of a poor lot in the face of an admissions cycle where families may otherwise have no estimated cost of attendance to work off of,” Suh-Toma wrote in a message to the News.

The FAFSA was first issued in 1992 with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

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The policy change, announced last month, comes after four years of a test-optional policy first adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, the News found that students from low-income backgrounds were more likely to omit scores from their Yale applications under test-optional policies. Additionally, international students have long expressed difficulties accessing SAT and ACT test centers in their home countries. 

Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions has maintained that test scores are only one part of a student’s application. They have also emphasized that scores can help contextualize other parts of Yale’s holistic review process, which considers students’ high school GPAs, recommendation letters and extracurriculars, among other factors — which, research suggests, may mean that test scores could prove more advantageous to low-income applicants than often thought.

Several students expressed generally positive reactions to the new test-flexible policy; however, they also expressed hopes that the University will double down on its commitment to inclusive messaging and to eliminating barriers to testing access.

“I’m really happy with this change and I think this should be the model that other Ivies follow,” said Annalie Diaz ’27, a QuestBridge match scholar who submitted her scores when applying to Yale. “They also should continue to push those explicit words, saying ‘we will take your score into context, we will be aware of the context of your school.’”

Reactions to and hopes for test-flexibility

In a statement posted on its website, the admissions office notes that test scores are considered in relation to others from an applicant’s high school.

“No exam can demonstrate every student’s college readiness or perfectly predict future performance,” the statement reads. “Tests can highlight an applicant’s areas of academic strength, reinforce high school grades, fill in gaps in a transcript stemming from extenuating circumstances, and — most importantly — identify students whose performance stands out in their high school context.”

For Diaz, the coupling of the new test-flexible policy with messaging that explicitly details how scores will be used and considered has alleviated many of the concerns she previously had about standardized testing.

Coming from an under-resourced high school, Diaz said that her score — which was below Yale’s average but well above her high school’s — was necessary in contextualizing other parts of her application.

Since announcing its test-flexible policy, the admissions office has expanded the range of scores published on its standardized testing page. Previously, Yale published scores from its 25th to 75th percentiles. Now, however, it lists the range of ACT and SAT scores from the 10th to 90th percentile.

Diaz said the decision to expand the published range is “great.”

“By extending the range of published scores of students at Yale, students can see that people from similar backgrounds with similar scores have submitted those scores and gotten into Yale,” she said. “They will be comforted by the knowledge that they don’t have to do as well as the students going to private prep schools, they just have to be able to stand out within their own context.”

But Christopher Vera, a senior at Wilbur Cross High School who was recently admitted to Yale’s class of 2028, looked less favorably upon the new policy. 

He said that standardized testing adds an extra stressor to high school seniors who are likely already stressed about college applications. Vera said that he does not think that expanding the types of accepted test scores — which now includes Advanced Placement, or AP, and International Baccalaureate, or IB, exams — will do much to alleviate this stress.

“Even though my school offers APs, I think that if this policy did affect me, I would still heavily prioritize the SAT,” Vera said. “Maybe I’d even prioritize it more than I did when Yale was test-optional. I feel like now that all students are required to submit scores, they will pay more attention to them. Now that scores are such a hot topic, I feel like I’d feel pressure to just get as many on my application as I could.”

Diaz holds the opposite view, and is hopeful that the expanded list of permissible tests will make it easier for students to obtain and submit scores.

She thinks that all acceptable test scores are useful in leveling the playing field between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“For me, what made me see the [tests] as this great equalizer between all students is that this is the one point in the admissions office in which all students can have at least somewhat similar grounding,” she said. “So for example, with extracurriculars, someone’s wealthy parents can get them an internship. For essays, students can hire private writing tutors. But everyone is taking the same [tests].”

Going forward, Diaz added that she said she would like to see the admissions office promote free resources to help students study for the tests from which they will now be requiring scores.

Reactions from international students

Last month, a News survey found that domestic respondents were 12 percentage points more likely to have taken a standardized test before college when compared to international respondents.

In line with the survey results, several international students described difficulty accessing standardized testing centers in their home countries, adding that tests are more accessible for wealthy international students.

Tajrian Khan ’27, who is Bangladeshi, described extensive financial barriers to taking SAT and ACT tests in Bangladesh. Unlike domestic high schools, which frequently distribute fee waivers, Khan said it was difficult to get financial help paying for testing because few students from his school were applying to college in the United States.

Khan is from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Every testing center in the country is located either in Dhaka or in Chittagong, the country’s second-largest city, he said. Students from anywhere but those two cities have to travel long distances and find overnight accommodations in order to take SAT or ACT tests, Khan said.

“The new policy doesn’t really do anything at all in the context of problems for international students,” Khan said. 

Jesse Okoche ’25, who is from Botswana and could not access a testing center when applying to Yale, shared similar concerns and called the new policy a “bummer.”

He said that his family has been scrambling to assemble the funds to send his little sister, who is currently applying to college, to Botswana’s only SAT testing center — five hours away from their home.

Adding APs and IBs to the list of accepted scores does little to alleviate international accessibility issues, Khan said. Even if a Bangladeshi student were able to access an AP or IB testing center, he said, they would have to self-study for the exam, putting them at a disadvantage to domestic students or students who are able to enroll in AP classes to prepare for the tests.

“No schools in Bangladesh offer AP classes,” Khan said. I know before this year, there were no AP testing centers in all of Bangladesh, so even if you wanted to take the test without a class, that wasn’t an option.”

Overall, though, Khan said he believes that test scores are an important measure and that he hopes to see Yale expand the list of acceptable scores in the future.

Okoche, however, was disappointed to see test scores become again required in any capacity, and agreed with Khan that the addition of AP and IB scores does little to improve international access.

Okoche said that, in addition to few SAT and ACT testing centers, IB curriculum is also rare in Botswana. He said there is only one private school in the capital city that offers IBs.

In the spring of 2023, a digital version of the SAT was offered internationally; the first digital version of the SAT will be administered in the United States later this month. Okoche said he is hopeful but not confident that a digitized SAT will improve international access.

“As an international student from a country that doesn’t send many students to Yale, I felt like, as one of the first to do something, I have this responsibility to open the door for the rest,” Okoche said. “And so this new policy is basically telling me that everything I’ve done has failed to open that door, failed to show Yale that [students who were unable to access tests] are capable, even though they don’t have that one metric Yale is looking for.”

But even though the new digital SAT and the new test-flexible policy don’t solve all of the access problems faced by international students, Okoche said he appreciates that the change is a “step in the right direction.”

Yale’s new policy makes it more accessible to low-income international students than policies recently adopted by other schools, Okoche said. As an example, he said that a student who could not apply to Dartmouth or MIT — two schools that recently reinstated a more stringent SAT or ACT score requirement — could perhaps still apply to Yale going forward.

“From all of this, my takeaway is hope,” Okoche said. “We’ve taken a step, and I’m hoping we can continue to take more steps.”

The first domestic digital administration of the SAT will take place on March 9.

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All other testimonies — which came from students, student collectives, college groups, a non-profit and the Yale College Council — supported the bill. One organization, the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, did not fully support or oppose the bill.

If passed, the bill –– SB 203 –– would prohibit public and private institutions in the state from “inquir[ing] about or consider[ing] a prospective student’s familial relationship to a graduate of such institution” when making admissions decisions.

Committee co-chair Sen. Derek Slap, who has championed the bill, said that he was encouraged by the hearing, which he called “part of a national movement” in state governments to reevaluate legacy admissions.

Slap said that the hearing was “by far the most robust conversation about admissions, legacy, privilege and opportunity in higher education” in which he has participated while part of the General Assembly. 

According to a study last year that drew on internal admissions data from several elite colleges, including Ivy League schools, legacy applicants are often “slightly more qualified yet are four times as likely” to be admitted to top schools.

Yale’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, Jeremiah Quinlan, testified against the bill for more than an hour over Zoom. In his remarks, Quinlan said he does not believe the General Assembly has the right to interfere with the university admissions practices.

“Just as every Connecticut college or university teaches different classes in different ways in fulfillment of its educational mission, each institution should likewise be allowed to assemble a student body that promotes its educational goals,” Quinlan wrote in a statement that he read out at the hearing. “A university may make a voluntary decision to forgo consideration of legacy status in the application process, but a Connecticut state law dictating that decision for independent colleges and universities would be unprecedented and would invite future legislatures to impose their own views on who should be admitted in ways that threaten academic freedom.”

Quinlan further described progress that the University has made toward enrolling more first-generation and low-income students since he began his tenure as Yale College’s dean of admissions. He argued that banning legacy admissions would not be necessary or useful to the cause of recruiting diverse classes, given the work Yale has done to increase access.

Per his testimony, 22 percent of students in the Yale College class of 2027 are eligible for Pell Grants, 21 percent are first-generation college students and 59 percent are domestic students who identify as members of a minority racial or ethnic group. Over the past 10 years, he said, the number of Pell-eligible students has doubled, and the number of first-generation students has increased by more than 60 percent.

Instead of banning legacy admissions, Quinlan suggested tht the state prioritize initiatives that directly help promote access for first-generation and low-income students, such as increased support for recruitment and outreach programs. He specifically noted increased support toward enrichment programs for less-advantaged high school students and increased funding of the Roberta Willis Scholarship Program, which offers need-based grants to Connecticut students enrolled at any of the 18 participating public and non-profit private colleges in the state. 

State Rep. Gary Turco said that preference for applicants with legacy status creates an “uneven playing field” that he believes has contributed to a larger national trend of decreased trust in higher education. Citing nationwide declines in enrollment numbers, high student loan debt and admissions scandals, Turco said that the message the bill might send about fairness would be as important as any practical impact on the universities’ diversity.

Turco estimated that currently, around 40 or 50 legislators would be prepared to vote in favor of the bill, noting that most others have not yet made a decision and only a “handful” would likely vote against it, out of the total 151 legislators in the House. He hypothesized that those who would vote against the bill are likely to do so because they are concerned about overregulating private institutions, not necessarily because they are in favor of maintaining legacy preference in admissions.

Turco said that although he thinks the bill is likely to pass in committee, he suspects it will struggle in a broader vote in the legislature because “private universities hold a lot of weight in the state.”

Rep. Dominique Johnson said that while they support the idea of a bill banning legacy preference, they are not satisfied with the current bill and would like to see it also ban schools from considering the donor status of an applicant’s family. Johnson is also advocating for the bill to clarify whether it applies to graduate and professional schools as well as undergraduate schools.

Birikti Kahsai ’27, who is a senator representing Branford College in the Yale College Council, testified at the hearing on behalf of the YCC. She told the News that the YCC has begun to advocate against legacy admissions as part of a broad collaboration between several student governments of Ivy League universities that have been adopting a unified stance against legacy admissions.

“We emphasize that the archaic practice of granting advantages in the application process on the basis of familial ties is antithetical to Yale’s commitment to meritocratic admissions,” the YCC testimony states. “Those historically granted the opportunity to form such connections were overwhelmingly White, wealthy and Protestant, due to the inaccessibility of higher education.”

Kahsai stressed that the goal of the YCC in opposing and testifying against the bill is not to attack individual legacy students but rather to pressure the Yale administration about its use of legacy preference, which she said YCC views as “incompatible” with Yale’s other admissions policies.

The testimony from the YCC was undersigned by seven Yale cultural clubs as well as The Yale First-Generation and/or Low-Income Advocacy Movement.

Jim Zhou GRD ’24 also testified at the hearing. He explained that he relied on food stamps throughout his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his undergraduate degree. He said that UCLA’s legacy-blind admissions approach has allowed the school to “excel with socioeconomic diversity” — and that Yale is lagging behind.

“I think that legacy admissions are perhaps one of the biggest barriers to achieving socio-economic diversity on campus because legacy applicants overwhelmingly come from backgrounds that have enormous amounts of privilege,” Zhou told the News.

New Haven civil rights attorney Alex Taubes LAW ’15 explained that the Connecticut legislature draws its authority to regulate private institutions, including universities, from an authority of state governments known as “police power.”

“This power allows the state to impose certain requirements on private institutions to ensure they contribute positively to the state’s goals for its education system and the overall well-being of its residents,” Taubes wrote in an email to the News. “When it comes to education, states have a particular interest in ensuring that institutions serve the public good, as education is closely linked to economic development, civic participation, and social equity.”

Taubes added that consumer protection law specifically could provide potential justification for a ban affecting private universities, with prospective students considered as consumers who ought to be protected from unfair or discriminatory practices.

Slap said that a vote on the bill in the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee will likely take place on either Tuesday or Thursday of next week; if passed, the bill will progress to the Senate floor of the larger legislature.

The bill, if enacted, would go into effect on July 1.

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The term bill includes tuition costs, which will rise to $67,250, and room and board for students who live on campus, which will rise to $19,900. The 2023-24 tuition was $64,700, and the room and board was $19,180. 

Despite the increase, University administration confirmed its commitment to financial aid and affordable tuition for students.

“People have difficulty understanding the relationship between the sticker price and the actual cost to them of an education at Yale,” University President Peter Salovey said. “We have to do a better job communicating that difference.”

Tuition costs have risen “mostly due to inflation,” Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis told the News. Twenty years ago, tuition was $29,820, and in 2014, tuition was set at $44,000. Ten years later, tuition now stands nearly $25,000 higher.

But, Lewis said, the costs of higher education rise at higher rates than the national inflation rate. Indeed, tuition has doubled in the last decade even though $100 in 2014 would be worth only about $127 in 2024.

Lewis said that tuition costs cover roughly one-fourth of Yale College’s total costs, with the endowment covering half and research grants and other funding covering the last quarter. 

The total budget to run the University is about $5 billion, Lewis said, citing the 2022 Yale budget report, but “the ratios haven’t changed all that much” as tuition has grown.

Lewis said that the largest expense for Yale College is salary and benefits, from both faculty and staff salary, which make up about half of the budget. 

In April 2022, Salovey’s For Humanity capital campaign — the University’s fourth and most ambitious fundraising effort — announced a $1.2 billion fundraising goal as part of the $7 billion campaign. In October, Eugénie Gentry, associate vice president for development and campaign director, referred to this announcement as the beginning of a larger marketing effort called “Be the Key,” which has yet to publicly launch.

By the April announcement, the figure raised for this effort was greater than $603 million and included gifts that have allowed Yale to offer universally free tuition at the David Geffen School of Drama and need-based, full-tuition scholarships to students at the Divinity School.

“Yes, it’s true that for a family where they don’t qualify for any financial aid from Yale, they are going to pay more to be here and those tend to be families in the top couple of percent of the income distribution,” Salovey said. “For any other family, when tuition goes up, they should feel that that increase will be taken care of by increased financial aid and more.”

Among the challenges of leading an institution like Yale is the public’s distrust of higher education because of the belief that it is not affordable, Salovey told the News in September. 

He added that, at present, Yale is “more affordable than ever” because of its generous financial aid programs. However, Salovey said that this is a “very hard” message to communicate to the general public because “many colleges and universities can’t provide those funds,” which Ivy League universities and other member institutions of the Association of American Universities can provide. 

Politics, Salovey also said, complicates this message even more, making it more challenging to “champion what’s great about universities.”

“All of that exists in a very polarized political climate that makes it difficult for a university in so many ways,” Salovey said in September. “What we really need is a pride in our university college and university system which I think is second to none in the world and, unfortunately, for various political reasons, universities are [often] attacked [which] has made it harder to run a university.” 

Despite an increased sticker price, the University emphasized that Yale College’s need-based financial aid will not be affected. 

“If a family’s financial circumstances stay the same, their net cost will stay the same,” Kari DiFonzo, director of undergraduate financial aid, told Yale News last month.

Yale’s undergraduate financial aid budget has more than tripled since the 2007-08 academic year, according to Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid. For the 2023-24 academic year, the financial aid budget was $241 million.

According to Quinlan, Yale is one of only eight American colleges that does not consider a student’s financial need when evaluating them for admission and meets every student’s demonstrated financial need without loans.

Yale’s need-blind status was challenged in a recent lawsuit alleging that the University — along with 16 peer institutions — was part of a price-fixing cartel. The University settled earlier this year but denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The admissions office’s top priority in its outreach work is raising awareness about Yale’s affordability and need-based financial aid, according to Mark Dunn, senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

Dunn pointed to Yale’s college cost estimation tool, MyinTuition Quick Cost Estimator, which he said has been useful in helping families understand the difference between Yale’s sticker price and the price they will actually pay. More than 50,000 net price estimates were generated using the tool last year, according to Dunn.

Additionally, since 2013, the admissions office has run a postcard campaign for prospective students from low- and middle-class neighborhoods. The campaign advertises the extent of Yale’s need-based financial aid policies. Dunn told the News that he believes the campaign is largely responsible for the increase in applications from lower-income students over the past decade.

“Sharing Yale’s commitment to affordability is the top communications priority for the admissions office in all of our outreach work,” Dunn wrote.

The University’s endowment was $40.7 billion in 2023.

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Under the new “test-flexible” policy, applicants must submit at least one score type out of a set of four: SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement, or AP, and International Baccalaureate, or IB. 

Yale first enacted a test-optional model in 2020, responding to impacts on standardized testing opportunities wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. For each of the four application cycles that have followed, Yale has renewed its test-optional policy by one year at a time. This change will make next year’s Yale applicants, the prospective class of 2029, the first required to submit test scores in five years.

In an interview with the News, the admissions office explained its goals for the policy and hopes for the future.

“We hope that this becomes a more widespread, better understood policy,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan said in an interview with the News on Thursday morning, after the College made its new policy public. “Because we knew that it was new, we felt pretty responsible for putting out the substance of the materials that we did. We also understand that this is the start of the conversation. We’re going to have to keep talking more about it, updating materials and spreading information as we move forward.”

Quinlan said that Yale decided to include AP and IB scores in the set of test types that fulfill Yale’s requirement because internal research suggested that they are similarly successful as SAT and ACT scores in predicting college academic success. 

By including AP and IB scores, Quinlan hopes that students for whom testing was not originally part of their college application plans — like students applying to schools who are otherwise test-optional or test-blind, such as the University of California system — will be able to also apply to Yale without having to devote extra hours to SAT and ACT preparation.

Applicants to the class of 2029 will see a new three-part section, according to the admissions office. The first section will allow students to select up to four score types they would like considered with their Yale application. The second will give students a space to report scores that do not appear elsewhere in their applications. The third, which will be optional, will allow students to explain the circumstances surrounding any of their included test scores.

If an applicant indicates that they want their AP scores considered with their application, they are expected to submit the scores for all AP exams they took. There is no maximum number of AP scores that can be submitted, according to Mark Dunn ’07, senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the admissions office. 

However, Dunn cautioned against students viewing a good AP score as a “ticket” into Yale, especially if the score is for a subject that does not showcase an applicant’s unique abilities.

“We really want to break out of the paradigm of students thinking that if they can just get a good AP score they’ll be set,” Dunn said. “As an example, we’ve used the case of, if you’re a native Italian speaker who is at a school that doesn’t offer APs, and you decide to just take the AP Italian exam and get a 5 and use that as the score you submit to us. Yes, you’ve met our requirements. But you haven’t helped your case, because you haven’t added any new evidence to your application.”

Because of how Yale is asking what scores applicants would like considered, it is possible for an application to make its way to the admissions office without any scores. 

In this case, Dunn said, the application would be considered incomplete. The admissions office plans to handle incomplete applications of this nature by following up directly with applicants and allowing them to update their applications to include scores after submission.

International access, financial barriers

In an interview with the News, Quinlan said that the admissions office acknowledges the barriers that exist for international students trying to take SAT and ACT exams but maintained the importance of test scores in Yale’s admissions process.

Earlier this month, a News survey found that current students who qualify for financial aid were more likely to have applied to Yale without submitting test scores than their wealthier peers. This trend also holds for international students. Several international students previously told the News that for them, lack of access to the required tests — at the time, the SAT and the ACT — was a bigger concern than deciding whether their scores were good enough to submit. 

Quinlan hopes new efforts to make the SAT more accessible will alleviate some of these concerns.

Students taking the SAT outside the U.S. first had the opportunity to take the exam online in the spring of 2023. Beginning this year, the online SAT will be administered to domestic students as well.

“I think there is a lot of hope that the digital SAT is going to make the international administration easier, less burdensome, more secure, and will hopefully change the ability and access people have to the exam,” Quinlan told the News.

Pranava Dhar ’25, who was head counselor of Camp Yale’s Orientation for International Students, generally favors the change since such tests are internationally standardized — he said exams like AP tests, IB tests, the SAT and the ACT can function as “universal litmus test[s]” that allow Yale to compare applicants across many academic systems.

But Dhar also is concerned that including AP and IB exams may exacerbate existing access divides.

“Students who go to international schools (which generally correlates with some privilege) can fulfill the requirement simply with their IB or AP scores, which is part of the curriculum, [but] these tests are exorbitantly expensive for anyone outside those systems.” Dhar wrote to the News on Thursday after Yale’s announcement. “This may put pressure on students outside those systems to sign up for these tests due to an ‘unwritten expectation’ even when SAT/ACT would suffice.”

Dhar’s comments are his own and do not reflect those of OIS broadly.

Discussions of international access did not play a large role in the decision to include AP and IB in the list of accepted tests, Quinlan said.

In interviews with the News earlier this month, many of the students who omitted scores from their Yale applications said that a main reason for doing so was that their scores were below the median range published on the admissions website.

Students said that seeing that their score was below Yale’s median likely would have deterred them from applying in a test-required admissions cycle.

The admissions office said they are aware of this and emphasized again that a relatively low score that stands out in relation to an applicant’s high school context can be extraordinarily helpful.

Dunn told the News that the office is in the process of expanding the median scores published on the admissions website from the currently-listed 25th to 75th percentile to instead show the 10th to 90th percentiles. He added, however, that this does not necessarily mean that applicants under the 10th percentile mark will not be competitive. 

“We’re encouraged by the fact that we have had lots of experience admitting and enrolling very talented students from lower-income backgrounds in years when we are requiring test scores,” Dunn said. “We did not have big challenges in our selection process responding to students with scores that were below our median.”

Quinlan hopes that other institutions will follow Yale’s lead and adopt a similar test-flexible approach in the near future.

“We understand that this is a new flavor of standardized testing,” Quinlan said. “But I hope that it’s one that other institutions will consider really seriously. Because it does continue to allow for some students for whom ACT or SAT testing is not part of their college plans to continue to provide the admissions committee with really valuable information that can help us respond to their talent and admit them to Yale.”

At present, more than 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities remain test-optional, according to a recent tally from FairTest, an organization that describes its goal to be “promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools,” according to its website.

Anika Arora Seth contributed reporting.

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“Our experience with both test-optional and test-required policies has persuaded us of three things,” the University wrote in a statement posted on the admissions office website. “First, when used thoughtfully as part of a whole-person review process, tests can help increase rather than decrease diversity in our class. Second, a narrow focus on only the ACT and SAT can discourage promising students from considering colleges like Yale. Finally, inviting students to apply without any test scores can, inadvertently, disadvantage students from low-income, first-generation, and rural backgrounds.”

The University is the second Ivy League school to announce its long-term testing policy, after Dartmouth decided to resume a test-required policy earlier this month. Unlike Yale, however, Dartmouth will not accept AP and IB scores to fulfill the testing requirement.

In the statement, the admissions office said that the four years of test-optional applications afforded it the ability to re-evaluate the role that test scores play in its deliberation process. New research by organizations like Opportunity Insights about the predictive ability of standardized test scores helped inform the admissions office’s decision, the website says.

Among Opportunity Insights’ findings are that students with higher SAT and ACT scores are more likely to have higher college GPAs than their lower-scoring counterparts, and that high school GPAs alone are poor predictors of college success.

The office maintained that, despite accepting more types of scores, it does not prefer one score type over another, and students who submit more scores will not be advantaged.

Yale urged applicants against taking more tests to increase the number of scores that they include in their application. A narrow focus on testing is “not a wise college preparation strategy,” according to the Thursday release.

Going forward, the Yale-specific questions on all accepted application forums — the Common Application, the Coalition Application and the QuestBridge application — will contain a space for students to report scores that they would like considered with their Yale applications.

In a different optional question, students will have space to explain any of the circumstances surrounding their testing experience.

The role of tests in admissions

Under Yale’s holistic review framework, standardized test scores can help contextualize other parts of an application, like high school GPA, according to the admissions office.

“No exam can demonstrate every student’s college readiness or perfectly predict future performance,” Thursday’s statement reads. “Tests can highlight an applicant’s areas of academic strength, reinforce high school grades, fill in gaps in a transcript stemming from extenuating circumstances, and—most importantly—identify students whose performance stands out in their high school context.”

When admissions officers evaluate applications that do not include test scores — as they have often had to do in the past four test-optional cycles — they are forced to put more weight on other parts of the application. But, according to the release, this process frequently disadvantaged less wealthy applicants. 

In a survey conducted earlier this month, the News found that students who receive financial aid were less likely to have submitted scores with their Yale applications than their wealthier counterparts.

Since going test-optional, Yale has seen a disproportionate increase in applications from students who would be the first in their family to attend college and students from neighborhoods with below-median household incomes. Applications to the class of 2028 saw applications from first-generation students and low-income students increase 13 percent and 19 percent more than the overall applicant pool, respectively.

In conversations with the News, low-income students who omitted scores said that they did so out of worry that a score below Yale’s median would take away from other parts of their application, or immediately disqualify them from consideration.

But Bruce Sacerdote, a researcher at Opportunity Insights, previously told the News that lower-income students submit test scores “at too low a rate,” according to his research. 

“We hypothesize that this stems from applicants not having full knowledge of how test scores are used in context,” Sacerdote wrote to the News. “Scores are used as only one input and are viewed in the context of the applicant’s background, neighborhood and high school. As a result, applicants may not realize that their score is an impressive one that could help their admission chances.”

The new comments from the admissions office are in line with Sacerdote’s research, affirming that a score below Yale’s median can actually be useful in identifying applicants who stand out within their high school or personal environment.

Students from well-resourced high schools often have access to easy “substitutes” for standardized test scores, such as many advanced courses, comments from teachers with whom they have close relationships and hoards of impressive enrichment activities, per the statement.

Students from lower-resourced high schools, on the other hand, may have less access to advanced courses that showcase their academic ability, and more generic comments from teachers who deal with larger class sizes, the release says.

“With no test scores to supplement these components, applications from students attending [lower-resourced] schools may leave admissions officers with scant evidence of their readiness for Yale,” the release says. “When students attending these high schools include a score with their application – even a score below Yale’s median range — they give the committee greater confidence that they are likely to achieve academic success in college.”

Access barriers and goals moving forward

In addition to increased applications from first-generation and low-income students, since going test-optional in 2020, applications from international students increased by 130 percent, twice the rate of growth of domestic applicants, according to data from the admissions office.

Numerous international students spoke with the News about the barriers to access they faced when trying to take the SAT and ACT in their home countries. Many students said they had to travel long distances, often to other countries, to take the tests, a process that students felt favored wealthier applicants.

In a recent episode of the podcast “Inside the Yale Admissions Office” titled “How We Got Here,” hosts Mark Dunn ’07, senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, and Hannah Mendlowitz ’12, associate director of admissions, said that it is “pretty easy” to understand why international applications increased when Yale adopted a test-optional policy.

“Registering for and taking the SAT or ACT abroad is much more challenging than it is in the US,” Mendlowitz said in the episode. “And understandably, many international students haven’t invested the same amount of time in preparing for or learning about those tests. So removing that barrier meant that a lot more international students could apply. And they did.”

As the admissions landscape has changed in the four years since most colleges went test-optional, Quinlan said he hopes adding AP and IB to the list of accepted scores will not disadvantage students who “have not had the ACT or SAT as part of their planning for college.”

Looking toward the future, Quinlan said that, while he is confident in the new test-flexible model, it is not set in stone.

“We are in a dynamic moment for standardized testing,” Quinlan told Yale News. “There are efforts to design and roll out new tests, and there is more energy for developing alternatives to the SAT or ACT than ever before. Although our research on the predictive power of the four tests we will accept next cycle is compelling, I like that our policy is flexible by design and can easily accommodate future additions to the list of required scores.”

Yale first announced a test-optional policy in June 2020.

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