How We Won

Student activists succeeded in making financial aid more progressive.

By Josh Eidelson, Yale University

This year, average tuition and fees at private colleges climbed by 6% to $21,235 a year. The high cost of an education is destroying the dream of achieving it for too many low-income students. Sadly, the past several years have been a period of backsliding in the economic diversity of elite universities. Reversing that trend requires a renewed and intensified commitment to funding the education of qualified students whose families can’t afford the rising cost of tuition. Financial aid policy plays a pivotal role in determining whether universities serve to foster opportunity or simply to reproduce existing privilege. That’s why we at Yale were excited two years ago to see Harvard make a historic reform in its policy by eliminating all tuition for students whose families make $40,000 a year or less. And we hoped to see Yale make a major move of its own towards a more progressive policy.

Instead, at a forum with students the next fall, Yale President Richard Levin told students that Yale would never follow Harvard in eliminating tuition for low-income students because that would make poor parents less involved in their children’s education. It wasn’t a very sympathetic argument. My parents, for example, wouldn’t trace their involvement in my education to the tuition bill they send Yale every semester. And neither would the parents of my friends who’ve had their tuition burden alleviated by Yale’s historic financial aid reforms – reforms that President Levin once said would never happen on his watch. Fortunately, four months later Levin was touting new reforms, such as lower expected contributions from middle and lower-income families, to the New York Times as a key move which “signal[s] that we’re serious about access.”

Getting Levin to change his tune required a broad-based and effective student movement. I was lucky to be a part of the group that spearheaded it, the Undergraduate Organizing Committee (a bland name for a great group). Here’s what made that victory possible:

Research: Before going out to talk to other students, we had to know what we were talking about. We brainstormed a list of specific questions about how Yale’s current policy worked, split them up, and came back with all the answers we could find through research. That meant that the only information we didn’t have was the info that either hadn’t been compiled or that Yale wouldn’t share (like the economic break-down of the student body). The second kind of research we did was into the experiences of other Yalies (including both those on and not on financial aid) with the financial aid system and their ideas and priorities for improving it. We came up with a survey and assigned one UOC member to be in charge of canvassing each of the 12 dorms, more or less at random, getting as many students as were willing to do short interviews. These interviews also served as crucial organizing conversations with students we might not have made contact with otherwise. These conversations helped us choose the most popular and achievable goals for our campaign, and they strengthened our legitimacy in dealing with the press, the administration, and other students.

Clear demands: We didn’t leave any room for confusion about what we wanted. We generated a platform based on our 300 interviews which combined bigger, more expensive changes with small, easier to carry out ones. The platform made it clear what we were calling for and why. And it put the onus on other students to decide whether they were for it or against it. Having a clear set of demands helped to crystallize what each of our actions was about, and combining many kinds of changes made clear that we weren’t just asking for more money for the sake of it.

Messaging:From the beginning, it was important in organizing conversations, public forums, and press interviews to use the messages that would be most effective in building support. That meant emphasizing a positive vision for how Yale could be stonger as a community by becoming a better leader on the issue. And it meant relentlessly driving home particularly damning statistics about the current problem, demonstrating the breadth of our support, and putting individual students’ personal narratives front and center.

Demonstrate broad support: People who expect petitions alone to move university administrators are kidding themselves. But in a campaign whose goal had the support of an overwhelming majority of students but whose tactics sometimes didn’t, having a good chunk of our peers on record supporting our ends made it difficult to marginalize us. Having a platform made it easy to explain to prospective petition signers exactly what they were expressing support for, and we managed to get over 1,000 students (more than one-fifth of the student body) to sign on, including some prominent campus conservatives. We also mobilized somewhat smaller numbers of students to take part in events like a Martin Luther King Day speak-out.

Reach out to allies: A potential ally is a terrible thing to waste. While the UOC’s work has mostly focused on Yale’s labor policies and its relationship to New Haven, we recognized early on that the financial aid campaign would appeal to a range of groups on campus, including some with which we had not previously worked closely. We reached out to ethnic organizations on campus concerned with the diversity of the Yale community, and we reached out to campus conservatives aware that Yale was falling short of the principles of meritocracy that they preached. This campaign was also our most effective experience working with the student government (YCC), which has traditionally had a fairly tense relationship with student activists. YCC members crafted a resolution strongly echoing the UOC platform, with more conciliatory language, which ultimately was passed unanimously by the YCC. This was a serious demonstration of the campus consensus behind what we were fighting for. And it ensured that there was a good cop (elected student government) pushing Yale’s administration on financial aid as well as a bad cop (stereotypical rabble rousing activists).

Demonstrate commitment to dialogue: We made sure that the Yale administration could never credibly claim that we were the ones who had passed up discussion. Early in the campaign, we asked for and received a forum with directors of Yale’s financial aid office. That was the first event to which we turned out students we’d met through canvassing. That forum was a chance for us to confront the disconnect between the theories of the people running the financial aid office and the experiences of the students affected. It gave us greater justification in calling for a meeting with the people who set the policies that the financial aid office carries out, including Yale’s President, Richard Levin. The platform, which we sent to Levin and other administrators with a request for a meeting, gave something concrete to which we could call on him to respond. We repeated our request for a meeting with Levin and added an MLK Day deadline. Before MLK Day, Levin responded by declining our call for a meeting again but announcing that he would hold an Open Forum on February 22. It was only after Levin failed at that forum to substantively address our proposals or commit to real change that we chose to escalate to a sit-in.

Escalate: If pressure isn’t building, it’s letting up. Along with furthering our organizing, each part of our campaign raised the stakes by escalating the aggressiveness of our action, the size of our constituency, or the importance of our target. That’s why we went from a canvass, to a forum with financial aid officers, to mailing a platform to administrators, to announcing a deadline, to a 150-student speak-out, to a 1,000 student petition, to an open forum with Levin himself, to a sit-in.

Organizing:This is the single most important principle of a successful campaign. Everything we did was an opportunity to involve more students and to better spread out responsibility and leadership. Winning, ultimately, was about pushing peers to recognize commonalities of experience and the potential for common solutions, and challenging each other to realize a better vision for our school and our community.

There’s still more left to win, at Yale and at campuses around the country. Here at Yale, the UOC is working for a reduction in the student “self-help” requirement, which consigns students on financial aid to spend hours working each week while their peers engage in the extracurricular life of the university (you can follow our campaign here). And, unfortunately, Congress’s assault on student loans has made it all the more essential that students stand up to ensure that their schools don’t balance the budget by eroding accessibility. We learned at Yale that even in a seemingly unfavorable climate, it’s possible not only to hold the line but to make real progress. It’s on us as students to make it happen.

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh