UP CLOSE | Yale’s FGLI community: fact or fantasy?

UP CLOSE | Yale’s FGLI community: fact or fantasy?

Though there is a robust group of students who use the first-generation, low-income label, there is not a clear consensus on if a community exists for FGLI students.
Published on April 11, 2022

When Lucas Shepard ’24 and his twin sister arrived at Yale in 2019, their parents gave them each $100, which was to be all the spending money they would have during their first year on campus.

But despite being deemed low-income based on U.S. tax brackets, Shepard rejects the label. Shepard, who hails from Brazil, stressed that both of his parents have Ph.Ds and that he considers himself financially privileged back home. It is the conversion from Brazilian real to U.S. dollars that renders him low-income.

“If I just took on the FGLI label, I would feel really weird about it,” Shepard said. “I don’t think it’s a label I deserve and that I would be downplaying my privilege.”

Yale’s FGLI community is tied together by socioeconomic status and familial privilege, but students in the community said that those shared experiences are not always enough to hold together a group with such diverse backgrounds.

More and more of these students are enrolling at Yale, but they do not all agree on what it means to be a FGLI undergraduate on this campus. There are programs in place, friendships to be made and widespread calls for more institutional and cultural support, but is there a FGLI community?

The News spoke to 10 FGLI students as well as several University administrators about their perceptions of an FGLI community, or a lack thereof, at Yale.

A growing population

Jeremiah Quinlan, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, said that expanding Yale’s socioeconomic diversity has been a “top priority” of his tenure since it started in 2013.

Under Quinlan, the percentage of undergraduate students receiving Pell grants — financial awards given to students with high levels of need — has increased from less than 13 percent in 2013 to over 19 percent in 2021. The number of students who are the first in their families to attend college has risen from below 13 percent to almost 18 percent over the same period. This translates to 500 more Pell-eligible students and 400 more first-generation students on campus than there were eight years ago, according to Quinlan.

The increase can be partially attributed to an overall increase in the size of the Yale College student body since the 2015 opening of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges.

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun said he and University President Peter Salovey — whose term, like Quinlan’s, both began in 2013 — share the admissions office’s commitment to bolstering Yale’s socioeconomic diversity.

“Our mission is to give people educational opportunities,” Chun told the News. “And because we have the resources to provide an exceptional education and college experience for our students, we think it is very important to try to share that as promptly as we can for those who have really earned it.”

Chun, Quinlan and Mark Dunn, director of outreach and communications at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said that Yale can serve as an engine of socioeconomic mobility for FGLI students. Quinlan and Dunn both stressed that increasing socioeconomic diversity, as well as diversity in general, benefits everyone on campus.

(Yale Daily News)

Jorge Anaya ’19, a FGLI alum, said that he could feel the number of FGLI students grow throughout his four years as an undergraduate.

“The term itself — FGLI — was not heard, or at least I didn’t hear it until I was a junior,” Anaya — who currently serves as assistant director of student engagement at the Yale College Dean’s Office, where he works to support FGLI students at Yale — said.

Anaya added that the spike in FGLI enrollment, as well as the introduction of more resources, has shifted the campus culture to one that is more open about FGLI identities and issues. Now that the population has grown, he said, Yalies can focus not only on broadening the FGLI community but also on exploring what the identity means for an individual student.

A complicated label

FGLI is a fairly new term to describe an identity, and it is not one the admissions office itself recognizes.

Dunn and Karin Gosselink, associate director of writing and tutoring at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, said they first heard the acronym “FGLI” used in the mid-2010s. They both speculated that the students may have brought the phrase to campus from an 1vyG conference. 1vyG was an annual gathering dedicated to empowering first-generation undergraduates at Ivy League universities.

According to Quinlan, the admissions office considers first-generation and low-income to be distinct groups that they examine separately when building a class of Yalies. He added that any grouping of the two identities comes later, once students have setted on campus.

On its website, The First-Generation Low-Income Community Initiative at Yale defines FGLI students as those who both hail from a low-income background and are the first in their family to attend college.

Colloquial student understanding of the acronym allows students who are just first-generation or just low-income to claim membership in the FGLI category. Anaya, for example, stressed the importance of saying “first-generation and/or low-income” when discussing the FGLI community.

“Generally, it is safe to say that a first-generation and low-income student is both, but we are conscious of the fact that is not the reality for every student,” Anaya said. “I still think being first-gen and being low-income does come with a series of challenges that can be shared among those students.”

Gosselink explained that both groups may lack familial and cultural resources that will help them maneuver through college, and that both must encounter “the hidden curriculum.” According to Gosselink, the hidden curriculum is the unsaid “set of expectations, norms, practices and institutional structures that define how the university functions.” Students from more privileged backgrounds often have an easier time navigating these structures.

Zoe Hsu ’24 — who identifies as both first-generation and low-income — concurred, writing in an email to the News that she thinks first-generation and low-income identities often overlap with and rely on one another.

But not all students agree that those who are first-generation, low-income or both should all be grouped together under the FGLI moniker. Nathalia Reis ’24 said that while they understand that first-generation students, low-income students and students who are both first-generation and low-income share experiences, consolidating so many backgrounds under one label can engender difficulties in building community. Sheikh Nahiyan ’24 said he thinks the label was created “largely out of convenience because they’re definitely not one and the same.”

Although Faiad Alam ’23 said that while he does not mind first-generation and low-income students being grouped together, he thinks that Yale should focus more on low-income students because he believes the most significant challenges facing FGLI students is a lack of financial capital.

“There are so many levels, particularly to being low income,” Tammy Chung ’24 said. “There are people who make 20k and people who make 50k and those are very different experiences.”

Chung and Alam, both of whom are students of color, said they had initially assumed the FGLI community at Yale would be composed of other students of color.

“When I came [to Yale], I was very surprised that there is a very big group of white FGLI students,” Alam said. “I’m very happy I met them because it made me reframe my definition of FGLI. There are white people here who are not from a privileged background.”

Dunn called the varied socioeconomic and racial makeup of the FGLI community “diversity within diversity” and emphasized that the admissions office does not assume first-generation or low-income students will have one specific background.

A threshold to meet

Alam only came to identify himself as FGLI once he got to Yale, because at home in Texas, he and his friends all came from similar backgrounds. Nevertheless, imposter syndrome regarding his FGLI classification rendered him slow to embrace the label.

“You feel like you need to reach a certain threshold to be FGLI,” he said.

Diego Lopez ’24 first encountered the FGLI label during a pre-college program in high school. He confronted this identity again once when he arrived at Yale and encountered a culture he called “elitist and individualistic and superficial.” But he said that he ultimately became comfortable with being FGLI, which he called his “source of strength.” He now serves as director of outreach for the Yale FGLI Advocacy Movement, also known as YFAM, and the deputy financial accessibility policy director for the Yale College Council.

“FGLI is not something I’m ashamed about. Sometimes, in a way, when I say I’m FGLI, [I know it means] I didn’t pull any strings to get to Yale. I worked my ass off.”

—Tammy Chung ’24

Chung echoed Lopez’s sentiment.

“FGLI is not something I’m ashamed about,” she told the News, “Sometimes, in a way, when I say I’m FGLI, [I know it means] I didn’t pull any strings to get to Yale. I worked my ass off.”

Still, Chung said she had never thought of herself as poor before she came to Yale because her family always had enough money to live off of.

Reis said that they know they are first-generation but that being low-income is not as “clear cut.” Although they identify as being low-income, they are conscious that because they grew up in Long Island, New York, where the cost of living is higher, their family’s income may be higher than other low-income students at Yale.

Shepard — who also grapples with the tension between his home finances and the low-income label — said he prefers to eschew calling himself low-income. He added that he is not the type of person who wants to discuss “their upbringing and their status and their identity. For me specifically, my hobbies and my passions are things that feel much more important.”

(Amay Tewari, Senior Photographer)

Shepard is not alone in this line of thought. Nahiyan is both first-generation and low-income, but he personally does not consider himself “super duper FGLI” and instead chooses to let other interests guide his time at Yale.

Reis said that although they may be FGLI, their identity is also more complex.

“I think being FGLI is an important aspect of my identity, but it’s not the only aspect,” they said. “It’s one of the factors that shapes how I view the world, just like any other factor like gender or race. It can be useful bringing out those different points of view, but it can also be isolating here at Yale.”

Lopez said he shared Reis’s sentiment, saying that being FGLI and being Mexican-American can both feel isolating on Yale’s campus.

“I think being FGLI is an important aspect of my identity, but it’s not the only aspect. It’s one of the factors that shapes how I view the world, just like any other factor like gender or race. It can be useful bringing out those different points of view, but it can also be isolating here at Yale.”

—Nathalia Reis ’24

Many FGLI Yalies seem to question the income side of their identity. But Taylor Chapman ’22, on the other hand, said that while she is low-income, the first-generation side of her FGLI identity is “more of a grey area.” Her parents took an untraditional path to post-secondary education, earning their bachelor’s degrees when Chapman was older. Although they now have college degrees, their different path to a degree has left Chapman on her own in navigating how to obtain a conventional degree.

But do these thoughts disappear after college?

While Anaya said he thinks differently about being FGLI now that he is a working professional, Gosselink said she is still grappling with her own FGLI identity. While both of her parents attended college, neither made much money and her mother suffered from mental illness which prevented her from working. Now as a parent with a P.h.D., she will be able to offer her son the institutional guidance she lacked as a college student, Gosselink said.

A bonding experience

Many FGLI students’ first encounter with Yale academics is a summer program called First Year Scholars at Yale (FSY). A virtual program, Online Experiences for Yale Scholars (ONEXYS), also offers quantitative education, but is not limited to first-generation and/or low-income students.

FSY scholars come to campus in the summer before they matriculate at Yale, and may take English 114 and a half-credit statistics course over the summer. They then enter Yale knowing each other, their residential college staff, the city of New Haven and how to succeed in a Yale course.

When FSY first ran a decade ago, only 36 people participated in the program. When it runs in the summer of 2022, Quinlan said he hopes over 100 pre-frosh will be able to take part.

Still, this is only a fraction of the low-income students on campus. According to Quinlan, FSY invites students to participate based on income, though high school type and a “human element” also play a part in deciding who qualifies.

Neither Reis nor Alam took part in FSY, and both said they feel like they missed out socially, by losing the chance to meet other FGLI students, and academically, by losing the chance to slowly adjust to Yale’s intellectual rigor. Beginning at Yale without the FSY transition period was difficult for both.

“I was literally placed in the wilderness trying to grapple with academics and navigate the social scene,” Alam said.

Gosselink said she hopes to hold more in-person events for FGLI students as public health restrictions loosen, which she hopes can help bridge the divide between those who did and did not do FSY.

Chung, Hsu, Lopez and Nahiyan all completed FSY virtually in 2020. Though Hsu said she met friends and mentors during the online program, Lopez and Nahiyan found that the bonds they made trickled away into the chaos of Yale life.

Through participating in FSY and the Science, Technology and Research Scholars Program (STARS), Chung has found that “90%” of her friends are FGLI. Although spots in these programs are limited, she said these initiatives are the best ways to meet other FGLI students. Nahiyan, who also partook in both FSY and STARS, noted that these opportunities disappear once you pass your first and second year at Yale.

Gosselink acknowledged this drop-off. FSY serves a limited group of incoming first years, and STARS is open to first years and sophomores — and only those interested in STEM. The Academic Strategies Program offers peer mentorship groups for first years and sophomores, but upperclassmen are expected to become mentors themselves and often lose out on formal support.

The FGLI students who spoke with the News had differing opinions on the bearing their FGLI identity has on the friendships they form, both through Yale initiatives and independent of them. Though Nahiyan said his FGLI identity has not impeded his ability to make friends in his residential college, Alam said it can often be a barrier.

“My ‘normal’ friends here talk about their backgrounds and their childhoods and then I talk about my background or my childhood, and they are astonished,” he said. “Then it feels like we didn’t have as much in common as we thought we did.”

He said that the experiences FGLI students share can make it easier for him to connect with them than non-FGLI students.

Reis said that they have a “different layer of relationship” with non-FGLI friends because they do not talk about things like money with people who do not share similar financial constraints. Lopez said he also refrains from discussing socioeconomic issues with more privileged friends because he believes they will either not understand or attempt to “overrelate” to his experiences without really listening. His closest friends are also FGLI, also Mexican and also from Los Angeles.

“My ‘normal’ friends here talk about their backgrounds and their childhoods and then I talk about my background or my childhood, and they are astonished,” he said. “Then it feels like we didn’t have as much in common as we thought we did.”

—Faiad Alam ’23

Hsu called her FGLI friends her “solace.”

“I don’t know a single FGLI Yalie who has not been absolutely kind, warm, compassionate, and empathetic,” Hsu wrote in an email to the News.

Reis said they do not want to force friendships that are solely based on shared identity, but added that they wished there were more events or spaces where they could meet FGLI students.

A room of one’s own

According to Alam, YFAM has advocated for the establishment of a physical space on campus — akin to the cultural houses or the Office of LGBTQ Resources — with the express purpose of supporting FGLI students.

Alam, Chapman and others said that a physical space could help centralize the community, which “essentially exists as a spider web across campus, stretching between all of the different student groups, cultural houses, and administrative offices,” according to Chapman.

Students proposed multiple functions for this space.

“They could host speakers, they could host mixers, they could host financial aid panels,” Lopez suggested. “You could kill three birds with one stone by giving them a space.”

Nahiyan concurred and said that the only place he can think to go when he has questions pertaining to FGLI issues or wants to meet students with similar backgrounds is a GroupMe group chat — “and who goes on GroupMe?”

Despite the universal support from the ten students who spoke to the News, Alam said that the process has been difficult because of administrative pushback.

Chun said he thinks FGLI students should consider all of Yale as their own.

“They should view this entire campus as their space, and in particular, they should view their residential colleges as their home and as a space that is really devoted to our students,” Chun told the News. “This entire campus should be viewed as one space.”

Chun pointed to the Schwarzman Center, university libraries and empty classrooms as spaces that could be used for student congregations and that FGLI students in particular can take advantage of programs like the Community Initiative, the Poorvu Center and FSY.

(Courtesy of Francis Dzikowski)

Though Gosselink said she understands why some administrators are concerned that an identity-based space would segregate FGLI students from the rest of the student body, she held that the effect would be the opposite. She explained that a space for FGLI students to ask questions, build community and be understood would bolster their ability to engage with the rest of the Yale community.

“The priority of the college has been for the students to feel like the residential college is their home,” Gosselink said, “But does it have to be the only home?”

Lopez, however, rejects this integration model altogether. He explained that he does not believe FGLI students should have to change themselves to fit in with Yale’s broader culture.

Both Lopez and Hsu said the principle of creating a space would be just as important as the eventual space’s function. Hsu said creating a space would “symbolize the FGLI community’s presence and importance” on behalf of the administration.

However, even proponents of creating the space disagree on how it should be modeled. Some use the cultural centers as a potential touchstone, while others reject the conflation of socioeconomic and ethnic identities.

Alam, for example, said he strongly believes FGLI students are a cultural group on campus because of “similar struggles, similar achievements, similar ambitions.”

But although Anaya also supports the creation of a FGLI-based space, he disagreed with Alam’s premise. Though he said he understands why people would think of the cultural centers as the model of a home for marginalized identity groups, he suggested that advocates for a FGLI space look to the Office of LGBTQ resources or the Women’s Center as examples instead.

“It would be wrong to solely base [a hypothetical FGLI space] on a mere copy cat of what a cultural center does,” he explained. “The work they do is so different, and there’s historical precedent for why those centers were created.”

Rather than portray FGLI as a cultural group, Anaya said Yalies should examine how the FGLI community intersects with other communities on campus.

Nahiyan said he felt more ambivalent on the question of culture. Though he personally would not feel offended if Yale created a “FGLI Cultural Center,” he said he could understand why others would not appreciate the appellation. Nevertheless, he claimed that the benefit of having a space, regardless of what it is called, would outweigh any backlash over naming conventions.

Anaya is optimistic that a space “could be a great avenue to pursue” once the administration moves past “crisis responding” amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Alam said he hopes this is the case.

“The day that happens I’ll be so happy,” Alam told the News. “Even if I’ve graduated it will make my day.”

A community?

When asked if there is a FGLI community on campus, Lopez said no.

“I honestly don’t think there’s a FGLI community here at Yale beyond the groups that are formed through student effort and relationships,” he told the News. He continued that it is “tokenizing” for Yale to focus on enrolling more FGLI kids without installing more structures to support them.

Chung said yes. She said she sought out programs that would serve her and those from similar backgrounds, which led her to other FGLI students. According to Chung, “If you put in the effort, the community is there.”

Hsu said both yes and no. She emphasized the value of her FGLI friends, though she said she feels “a sense of loneliness” when she remembers how much of a minority FGLI students are on campus.

If the FGLI community does exist, it is one of little consensus.

Dunn said he was not surprised that there is disagreement among FGLI students about cohesion of the community.

“This community is much larger than it was just in recent history and it’s also I think more diverse in terms of the kind of student, the kind of background,” he explained.

Nevertheless, the students agreed that Yale — and Yale students — can better serve FGLI students.

As Yale College Council Vice President, Hsu is advocating for a stipend that would cover the cost of laundry, technology replacement, course supplies, printing and more. Despite her belief in these policies, Hsu said it can be “exhausting” for FGLI student leaders like herself to continually stand up for their community, especially when “there are no other voices to support the initiatives we are consistently fighting for.”

Reis raised a similar point, telling the News that being FGLI is “more than just a financial struggle or a lack of information or experience. A lot of time it manifests as mental strain.”

They added that everyone at Yale — student or administrator, FGLI or not — must contribute to making Yale a more accessible place for members of the FGLI community.

However, they acknowledged that the FGLI community is not one that is “unified.” This state of segmentation, which characterizes the whole community, is also evident in the emergence of various FGLI-based extracurriculars at Yale instead of one, overarching group.

Though Alam is part of YFAM, he criticized the fragmented nature of FGLI groups on campus.

“I wish all the groups were bigger and had more power to do more stuff and were more interconnected,” he said. “We can all do something huge together instead of The Community Initiative doing one thing and YFAM doing another and Questbridge doing another.”

Anaya said he thinks there is power in the various pockets of FGLI communities on campus because there is space for every FGLI student to feel comfortable, but he added that there is power in them joining together as well.

When asked whether there is a FGLI community, Anaya responded with certainty.

“The simple answer is yes,” he said. “I think the better question is … what would you want it to look like?”

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