Students who seek information about Yale, and apply to Yale, have good friends in Westchester’s Yale alumni. Approximately 100 Yale alumni in Westchester stand ready to assist, and interview students who become Yale applicants.

 Yale provides a great quantity of information to high school guidance counselors and students who request it, through mailed documents and access to the University’s website (www.yale.edu). Still, students often have lingering questions about the educational experience at Yale. What is life like in New Haven? How hard is the academic competition?  Am I likely to face a problem with a striking union?

 Some of these lingering questions reflect Yale’s prominence in the news. It helps enormously to have Yale Alumni address potential applicants’ questions regarding Yale. Those are perspectives that members of the Yale Westchester Alumni Association can provide.  

Many students applying to Yale also want to know how to navigate Yale’s academic requirements while pursuing special interests, such as sports, music or foreign study. It is important for high school and prep school students to discover how flexible a university such as Yale can be. It is a university that can tailor its resources to the needs and interests of the students admitted. 

Yale’s Department of Admissions has organized Alumni Schools Committees throughout the world, including Westchester. Between 100 and 200 students who apply to Yale are interviewed by Yale alumni every year. Sometimes these interviews supplement a student’s visit to Yale and interviews on campus. Other times, the Westchester based interviews are the only interviews available for applicants at the time that their application is received.

To encourage follow through after acceptance to Yale, the Alumni Schools Committee holds a reception every year for accepted applicants before they   decide to accept Yale as their school of choice and be admitted. The reception draws a representative from Yale Admissions and several Yale students who form a panel to give their views of Yale and to respond to questions from accepted students. The reception also draws together Westchester seniors who have been accepted with their parents and representative Yale alumni.

 Beginning in the 2003-2004 school year, applicants no longer can seek Early Decision. Yale has concluded that the Early Action alternative of earlier years is better for all concerned. Under the Early Action program, students can be accepted early by Yale, but students are not required to abandon alternative applications. Yale was not worried about attrition since such a large pool of outstanding students is available to Yale, but was concerned about the negative pressure placed on students to quickly make up their minds early in their senior year of high school, before they had much of an opportunity to investigate all of the alternatives. As Yale University President Richard Levin said in a recent Westchester gathering of alumni, “Yale is not the only wonderful school available to Westchester students”.