According to Ferentz Lafargue — the associate dean of residential college life — transfer applications are reviewed by members of the Yale College Dean’s Office and Student Affairs Office and, occasionally, residential college staff. He wrote that there was no particular trend in which college received the most requests each application cycle, adding that it was not apparent what causes these shifts year to year. However, rising sophomores tend to make up the majority of transfer applications.

Students can reapply for a transfer request if their initial application is not accepted.

“The most common reason is a desire to live with friends in another college with whom they have formed a close connection,” Lafargue said. “Without fail this is the reason cited in over 90 percent of the applications every year.”

Lafargue explained that when evaluating students’ applications, the two primary criteria considered are how the transfer requests will impact the residential college dean’s advising load and the college’s ability to house upper-level students.

According to Lafargue, after Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges opened in 2017, the number of overall applications increased significantly. This number has since declined, with 138 applicants in 2022 compared to 72 in 2025, while the acceptance rate jumped from roughly 38 percent to 74 percent in the same time span. 

“I’m really looking for mentorship, and also just a space [where] I know people are looking out for me,” said Andy Mejia ’28, who submitted a transfer application this cycle but was denied. “But also [a place where] when it comes to events or things related to your residential college that people take strong pride in that.”

Mejia emphasized the importance of community in his decision to transfer. He told the News that he had found it difficult to make connections with older students, despite looking forward to receiving “mentorship” from upper-level students.

However, Mejia emphasized that he had found strong connections within his own class year. He noted his primary motivation for transferring was not the environment at his current residential college but instead that he had found what he was looking for in a different college.

“I’m somebody that really likes to have upperclassmen friends and just feel like I’m part of a cohesive community,” said Mejia. “I like the space I inhabit to be really interconnected.”

Jerry Huang ’27 echoed these remarks. Huang said that he decided to transfer last year from Timothy Dwight College to Pierson College, wanting to live with a group of friends who he shared classes with.

He hoped that sharing a suite would allow them to collaborate on problem sets and other common assignments. However, Huang noted that now most of his closest friends all live in different colleges.

“I don’t think for me the resco was really like a barrier for my social life,” said Huang. “For me, I can always just bike to places.”

Benjamin Mousseau ’25 transferred from Saybrook College to Ezra Stiles College last year after receiving an offer to be a first-year counselor at the college. As a FroCo, Mousseau was not required to complete the standard transfer application process.

He noted that although he had assumed he would have “dual citizenship” between the colleges, his swipe access to Saybrook common spaces was initially revoked following the transfer.

However, after speaking with the assistant director of operations at Saybrook, he was able to receive swipe access again to some of the spaces. Mousseau noted that he had enjoyed finding a new community at Stiles as a senior.

“When I first joined Stiles, I was touched by some friends I knew who knew I knew were in Stiles. They reached out to me and were like, ‘Oh my gosh. You’re coming to Stiles that’s so exciting! Welcome to the herd,’” he said. “That was really sweet.”

Offering advice to current transfers and prospective FroCos, Mousseau emphasized remaining open to change and advised students not to dismiss the idea of becoming part of a new college community. 

Jonathan Edwards is the oldest residential college at Yale.

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“We’re seeing a lot of employer demand — it’s just different than it was 10-15 years ago,” wrote Abigail Kies, the assistant dean of career development at SOM. “It’s no longer about employers going to a few campuses to hire, all with timelines in sync with their competitors. It’s not as much about employers hiring many students for the ‘same’ positions and figuring out exactly where they’ll be when they arrive.” 

Kies explained that several factors contributed to this year’s drop in post-graduation employment rates. Kies pointed out that the numbers from two years ago were impacted by the considerable expansion undertaken by the big consulting firms, and that 2024 signified a return to “still strong yet more historic” numbers. However, Kies also noted many graduates accepted offers after SOM’s data reporting deadline.

Decreases in post-graduation employment offers has been a recent trend across business schools. At Harvard Business School, only 85 percent of graduates received job offers post-graduation, compared to 95 percent in 2022. Similarly, at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s Sloan School of Management, only 77 percent of students in the class of 2024 had accepted job offers three months post-graduation, as compared to the 93 percent that was the average during the decade to 2022.

Kies stated that there is still demand for MBAs and especially SOM MBAs. And while some big brands have taken a step back in terms of hiring MBAs, others employers have joined the market to acquire the newly available talent to join their respective organizations. Moreover, Kies made clear that the employment report only communicates the choices graduate students have made and not the opportunities and offers students had as there is no complete information on declined offers.

“During COVID, all the consulting firms made huge cuts to their workforce because they thought they were going to lose a lot of money coming out of COVID in 2021 into a robust economy — there [were] major gains made, and then in order to supplement those gains, they sort of had the staff back up, and they started to hire like crazy,” said Shivansh Chaturvedi SOM ’25, a second-year master’s student and career advisor at SOM. “And then 2024 came, and things slowed back down. And that meant they had to either, in many cases, fire a lot of their employees, but also not hire a lot of employees,” Chaturvedi added.

Chaturvedi explained that the declines were probably caused by the decline in major industries that hire SOM graduates, including consulting, banking and tech. Chaturvedi said that since more than 40 percent of SOM graduates go into consulting, it contributed significantly to the drop in post-graduation employment rate. In addition, since the other big employers of SOM graduates, investment banking and technology, also experienced a similar trend, many students who were targeting those industries had a harder time finding a job.

But Chaturvedi further explained that while the class of 2024 had around 35 people gain consulting internships, the class of 2025 had 35 students get a consulting internship in one firm, which indicates that these firms may be starting their hiring pipeline back up again. Chaturvedi stated that in recent years, there has been an increased trend of students going into more non-traditional industries such as impact investing and nonprofits, which generally have a longer searching period.

In addition, Chaturvedi noted the 10 to 20 percent of students, which is about 35 to 50 students in the graduating class, who aren’t immediately jumping on job offers might be those who just want to take more time or need some time to figure out exactly what they want to end up doing.

“Generally speaking, it’s just getting more competitive for applicants, across the board, in all of these industries. And so for MBA students in particular, this is difficult because these are largely the industries that they’re seeking direct employment [in],” said Pol Berger Romeu ’25, the president of Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group.

Romeu said that many firms are actively cutting down available positions, explaining that in recent years these firms have sized down their internships programs, which impacts undergraduates as well as some MBAs. In addition, they have also laid off a lot of their senior employees, which would presumably affect MBA graduates as well. Romeu further explains that a part of the reason that this affected MBAs quite a bit is the fact that a lot of them are looking at these same industries such as banking and consulting.

Moreover, Romeu noted that some undergraduates are now questioning the value of an MBA, especially as a lot of firms are choosing to keep their employees around for those two years that they would have spent in school and instead accelerate their progress in-house. 

In addition, Romeu points to an increased trend in combining MBAs with another degree, such as a JD or even an MD as more and more people look at alternative paths. Although as Romeu explained, this doesn’t signify a shift in those who had aspirations for an MBA looking to add something on to their MBAs, but rather, a lot of those pursuing other professional and graduate degrees deciding to pursue an MBA alongside their studies.

In fact, Romeu said that he believes that there will always be an interest in MBA programs, since they do offer a great networking opportunity, as well as the opportunity to gain strong connections in similar fields that might serve one down the line.

“I’d be much more curious and much more interested to see where the students end up a year after graduation, and equally curious to see how their career paths are impacted a decade down [the line],” explained Chaturvedi. “I think the value of the MBA is generally seen to be something longer term.”

The School of Management was founded in 1976.

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In recent years, Yale Hospitality’s partnership with DESK has been possible through the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, a not-for-profit student organization dedicated to alleviating food and housing insecurity in New Haven. YHHAP serves as an umbrella organization for multiple projects, including Yale Community Kitchen, or YCK, and Kitchen to Kitchen, both of which aim to reduce food waste in the University’s dining halls.

“The prepared foods that DESK and YCK receive from Yale Hospitality frequently include ingredients that we do not have access to through Connecticut Foodshare and other low-cost retailers,” wrote Steve Werlin, the executive director of DESK. “As a result, this partnership enables the distribution of a greater variety of foods.”

Werlin explained that Yale Hospitality supports DESK in three ways. Yale weekly donations of prepared foods to both DESK and YCK. Yale Hospitality also supports DESK’s Thanksgiving for All program by preparing and packaging up to 750 meals to be delivered on Thanksgiving Day. Lastly, Yale Hospitality hosts a big fundraiser for DESK each March, which raised over $100,000 last year.

Werlin further noted that Yale has several programs that provide opportunities for Yale students and faculty to participate in DESK’s efforts. DESK often works with Yale Divinity School and the School of Public Health to place Yale-affiliated individuals in service positions. Students and faculty of the Global Health Justice Partnership, a collaboration between the Yale Law School and School of Public Health, also support DESK’s work.

“We envision that DESK’s future relationship with Yale Hospitality will be to continue to partner so we can, together, provide essential basic needs in the form of prepared meals, and raise critical funds that ensure DESK remains a solvent stalwart in the community,” wrote Werlin.

However, Andrew Landsbergen ’25, one of the three project heads of K2K, explained that there has been a lack of consistent communication from the dining halls. K2K’s main purpose is to pick up food from the various dining halls and deliver it to DESK during the week, from Monday through Thursday. However, according to Landsbergen, since the pick-up and delivery require direct communication with the dining halls and their managers, and there are no established channels of communication between K2K and the different dining hall managers, the delivery process can sometimes be hindered.

Yale Hospitality did not immediately respond with comment. 

Landsbergen added that improving communication with dining hall staff is a long-term goal. In the short term, Landsbergen is focused on attracting more volunteers and program leaders, because most of the current project heads are graduating in the upcoming spring.

“We’ve been thinking about expanding to some other hubs, kitchens and the like, and maybe doing runs at different times, but that’s kind of the long-term thing,” said Landsbergen. 

In addition to K2K and Yale Hospitality’s efforts, YCK is also a crucial part of Yale’s involvement with DESK.

YCK is a student-run soup kitchen that works with DESK to support the New Haven Community. YCK coordinators and volunteers pick up food from different dining halls, prep the food and serve it, according to Nolyn Mjema ’26, a project head of YCK.

Madeline Pitre ’26, also a project head of YCK, explained that YCK and DESK partner together to serve meals every day of the week and balance the workload between DESK staff and YCK volunteers.

Pitre and Mjema also told the News that they are looking to create a more sustainable funding structure as the amount of guests they serve has expanded. 

Since the main source of funding comes from the Yale Undergraduate Organization Funding Committee, which can be inconsistent, Pitre and Mjema explained that they have been looking for other funding opportunities and as of recently have focused their efforts on raising money from the upcoming Yale Student Organizations Annual Raise or SOAR.

SOAR this year will open on Dec. 3 and close on Dec. 10, and anybody from alumni to students and parents can participate.

“Our main goal is to feed as many people as possible,” said Mjema. “So most of the effort goes to week-to-week operations and to make sure we have enough volunteers, enough coordinators, enough supplies to maintain operations” added Pitre, stressing the need for more volunteers.

Students can join YCK by subscribing to their mailing list and can learn more about and join K2K here.

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Nahuatl being part of the Whitney Humanities Center means that both faculty and staff now have a space where they can explore and learn Modern Nahuatl. The News spoke with the coordinators of the program and an expert of Nahuatl, who all expressed their excitement for the expansion of indigenous language programs at Yale. 

“I was learning Nahuatl at Brown for two years, and once I was accepted into the PhD program here after taking some time off, I wanted to  have the dedicated time to learn Nahuatl again,” wrote Alexa De La Fuente GRD ’30, a Graduate student at the Department of American Studies, who along with Ilianna Vásquez ’28, a Graduate student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, serves as the coordinator of the program. 

Since Yale does not have a designated Nahuatl course, the first and only indigenous language offered being Cherokee, De la Fuente was connected with Vásquez who helped her navigate Yal’’s linguistic resources and obtain the necessary funds to pursue her study in Nahuatl. Soon after, Vásquez and De La Fuente decided to create a sustained space for the collaborative learning and interdisciplinary engagement with Nahuatl and Nahua culture. This initiative evolved into the Nahuatl Working Group program, which held its first official meeting on Oct. 25.

The Whitney Humanities Center provides funding for an interdisciplinary, discipline-based Working Group that brings together faculty, researchers and students from across the humanities.

Yale has previously offered a summer Nahuatl program. From 2009 to 2017, Yale, in collaboration with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, IDIEZ, a Mexican non-profit organization that focuses on the teaching, research and revitalization of Nahuatl, offered a six week summer program that provided pedagogical training for indigenous instructors. 

“Pretty much every university in the United States that teaches Nahuatl, they’re actually contracting with us [IDIEZ] one way or another to do it, and the program is owned by that university, and we supply the teachers” explained Professor John Sullivan, the co-founder of IDIEZ and the current director of its summer program.

Vásquez explained that both De La Fuente and herself have taken IDIEZ courses in the past and noted that working with their instructors “was incredibly inspiring.” 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also noted that they draw from IDIEZ’s instructional resources, which bridges the linguistic and cultural components of learning Nahuatl and which includes the pedagogical strategy of full emergence. 

The program’s main objective is to learn and advocate for Nahuatl instruction as a group. Thus, a typical session might include reviewing vocabulary and grammar, reading excerpts in Nahuatl, discussing cultural contexts and discussing the group’s “concerted effort advocating for Nahuatl sources and building connections beyond Yale,” explained De La Fuente and Vásquez. 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also pointed to the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese, History of Art, American Studies, Classics and History of Art — which includes Dr. Allison Caplan, a History of Art scholar and a former IDIEZ student — as being instrumental in the development of the Nahuatl Working Group in addition to the support of the Native American Cultural Center, RITM, WGSS and the Whitney Humanities Center itself. 

“Learning Nahuatl deepens students’ connection to Indigenous perspectives, offering insight into worldviews that are often marginalized in mainstream narrative,” wrote Vásquez and De La Fuente in a joint statement. “It also fosters empathy and respect for the cultural complexity and resilience of Indigenous communities.” 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also noted that there is no formal syllabus and that the group aims to operate on “collaborative learning.” They further explained that the curriculum they have been taught cannot be separated from the culture, traditions and beliefs of the Nahuatl people they are learning from and that the Working Group was created with that in mind. 

Vásquez and De La Fuente also expressed their hope to expand the program and possibly make it into a structured class.

Sullivan further noted that Nahuatl’s survival and flourishing requires its expansion “beyond the family, the cornfield and the market,” and into new avenues such as Higher Education. Sullivan explains that in both Mexico and the US, universities typically do not employ indigenous people to teach their languages and cultures, let alone to offer content courses in their languages or carry out research on indigenous languages and cultures and publish their findings in those languages.

“Each language provides its speakers with a unique set of tools for apprehending, organizing,

interpreting and critiquing the problems that we all face as human beings.” said Sullivan. When a University like Yale hires professors who have gone through the same Western Education, and who teach, conduct research and publish in a single language, it creates what we could term ‘academic incest.’ This situation seriously limits Yale’s ability to solve human problems.” 

Any interested Yale student, faculty or community member of any level can join by filling out the form found at the Nahuatl Working Group page. 

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“When elections are very close, we have to understand that our ability to forecast them will be limited,” professor Gregory Huber wrote. “This shouldn’t surprise us, just like we have to watch the World Series or the Superbowl to see who wins. We can’t predict close things and we shouldn’t expect to be able to do so.”

Huber cited the difficulty associated with getting reliable data on the individuals in the battleground states who will likely decide the outcome of the election, especially those who have not voted in past elections. Huber added that the closeness in the seven swing states in this year’s election leaves little room for any error and makes election forecasting especially challenging.

Professor Kevin DeLuca added that the issue with this year’s polls is not that they are unreliable, but rather they aren’t precise enough to pinpoint who the victor in a very close race. 

“I think the predictions are right: because they all predict a close race with no clear likely winner,” DeLuca wrote.  

During the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections, polls underestimated support for Donald Trump, and DeLuca said he will be watching this year to see if pollsters have gotten better at accurately predicting support for Trump. 

DeLuca said that it is also possible that pollsters have tried to compensate for past underestimates of support for Trump and so may now be overestimating his chances.

DeLuca further noted that incumbency, a key factor in determining election results, is complex this year. Vice President Kamala Harris could be considered an incumbent as the vice president but is trying to emphasize that her administration will not be a simple continuation of the Biden administration. Trump on the other hand, while technically not an incumbent, has been a President before and has expressed his desire to continue doing what he did during his first stint as President — somewhat like an incumbent.

DeLuca highlighted that the Dobbs decision could boost Harris, especially among young women. 

However, while Trump’s extremism, criminal charges and age hurts his support among moderate voters, the inflation and affordability crisis during the Biden administration works against Harris. 

According to DeLuca, three recent models predicted Harris would win, while five predicted Trump would win. DeLuca’s own model, based on economic conditions and candidate quality differences, predicts a Harris victory. However, since these models do not indicate a clear winner, the election is quite unpredictable.

“I’d be very surprised if we knew the outcome on election night. I think the thing that no one knows really is what the turnout operations are like on the ground in the five or six swing states that really matter,” professor Daniel HoSang added. “This election kind of captures and exemplifies that fear and mistrust and uncertainty about everyone’s future.”

HoSang noted that there is a sense of public “fatigue and exhaustion about the tenor of the campaign,” as well as fear for the outcome, not simply due to the candidates and the electoral campaign itself, but due to the deeper anxieties that many people have of the future as well. 

These fears of the outcome might be caused in part by the continued deterioration of public trust in our institutions, political systems and elected officials, HoSang noted, is disconcerting because all of our biggest issues require some degree of bipartisan cooperation to be solved.

“There has to be some shared commitment to doing something together. “ clarified HoSang. “When we have elections and political climates like this that deep in everyone’s mistrust, it makes those kinds of collective projects much more difficult for the long term. So in that sense, a little cliche, but there is a way in which, like everyone is going to lose.” 

However, HoSang also expressed his hope that the worry and apprehension that many feel will not translate into cynicism. 

“I think cynicism is the poison that we all have to avoid, even when we feel apprehensive in all these ways,” said HoSang.

The current 538 presidential election forecast gives Trump a 52 percent chance of winning.

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