New Colleges

 

I want to go to a Yale where students in the two new residential colleges immediately feel like an equal part of the Yale community. Yale has, for a long time, been thinking about how to prepare for an influx of new students and how to fully integrate the new colleges into the fabric of social life at Yale, but there are still uncertainties that remain. YCC should be proactive in making sure that student concerns and suggestions about the new residential colleges are heard, and that problems are anticipated and resolved before they arise.

Yale should:

  • Ensure that Freshman Counselor groups in the new colleges are co-ed. Data from the Report on the Freshman Experience that I compiled last year show overwhelming support for co-ed groups, but some colleges have historically had single-gender Froco groups.

  • Provide extra funding to the new colleges over their first few years, with the specific intent to establish a slate of exciting social activities that will draw interest and attendees from all over campus (such as Branford’s Crushes and Chaperones and Pierson’s Inferno).  

  • Hire new Residential College Masters who commit to ensure that the upperclassmen transferring to the new colleges, and especially the corps of Freshman Counselors, are representative of Yale College’s diverse and vibrant student body. Many students will want to transfer colleges with their friends, and this could create homogeneous classes of students in the new colleges.

  • Establish more student jobs to deal with the growing demand.

 

What YCC can do:

  • Determine how the new colleges will be represented on the 2017-2018 YCC, perhaps with a September election to coincide with class council voting.

  • Host several YCC events, and especially provide funding to FCC to host freshman events, in the new colleges early in the 2017-2018 school year. For these colleges to feel equal rather than isolated, students from other colleges need to have reason to visit on a regular basis.