Yale's appeal undiminished after year of scandal

Despite a year of controversy and media scrutiny, Yale admissions expects a bumper crop of new applicants

By Orianne Dutka

Although many high school seniors spent the evening of Sun., Oct. 31 engaging in Halloween festivities, a few thousand sat at home making final changes to their Yale applications. This week, the Yale Undergraduate Admissions Office received the first batch of what will eventually total around 13,000 applications for the 1,300 slots available for the Class of 2004. Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw and the 16 members of the Admissions Office have had to face the challenges of promoting the University in the face of last year's controversies surrounding former Saybrook master Antonio Lasaga and former Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin. In addition, Yale has suffered from negative portrayals in popular literature, including the Fiske Guide to Colleges' statement that there are "cracks appearing in the Ivory Tower of Yale," and its description of Yale as a solely humanities-oriented school in a run-down environment.

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Despite Yale's recent controversies, the Admissions Office is still flooded with applications for the Class of 2004.

Yet Shaw remains optimistic. He is unshaken by The New York Times' [9/12/99] suggestions that Yale has been unfair to former Yale professor James Van de Velde, a suspect in the Jovin case, and Vanity Fair's characterization in its July issue of the Jovin case as the potential "Ivy League version" of the JonBenet Ramsey case. "We don't know how this year's applicants will be impacted," Shaw said. "Last year, we were not really affected. In fact, we had the largest application pool and largest yield of accepted students in history. I think that people understand that sadly these events can happen anywhere."

Challenging the view that New Haven is an unsavory city has been especially difficult because college critiques like Kaplan's College Catalog include reviews such as, "If there's one downside to Yale...it's the location. New Haven at the present is no Boston or New York." The Fiske Guide even comments that New Haven is "the main reason Yale's applications have failed to keep pace with those at Harvard and Princeton in recent years." Shaw said that when students visit and see all of the offerings that New Haven has, they realize that "there's so much good stuff happening here." He also sends out pictorial brochures on the city to accepted students which show the benefits of Yale's urban location.

Like Kaplan and Fiske, this year's U.S. News and World Report rankings were yet another blow to Yale's institutional ego—it tumbled from a tie with Harvard and Princeton for first place to a fourth place tie with Princeton behind the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard. "Rankings are often misleading in that the editors choose to focus on different aspects of universities," Shaw said.

Yale has also been negatively represented in the media—this summer's thriller Eyes Wide Shut featured Yale-clad gay-bashers, and the evil Mr. Burns on The Simpsons always flaunts his Yale ties. Most people know to look beyond a movie or TV show for what Yale is about," Shaw said. "The Simpsons is actually one of my favorite shows, now that I know that the Yale-bashing is due to the writers being from Harvard."

Despite all of the recent challenges the Admissions Office has faced, it has continued to rely on traditional methods of advertising. Soliciting students by mail as well as offering a comprehensive website are among the more standard recruiting tools. A video highlighting the residential colleges and Yale faculty is shown to prospective students visiting the campus. The Admissions officers also spend a great part of their year traveling to nearly all 50 states as well as several international sites. "Yale is blessed by name recognition, but the farther you get from campus, the less students really know about the school," Shaw said. In recent years, Yale officers have held joint recruiting sessions with other universities such as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown. Shaw said that the events "were very successful because we got a larger cohort of students...some students would be there to look at one of the other schools and would come over to see us." Past joint sessions have been held in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Canada. Shaw said, however, that the most successful recruiting is that done by past and current students and faculty members.

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