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October 15, 2008
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Q.Yale and Harvard and other universities announced a boost in financial aid. Please tell us more about that new program. A.Last year we made a major improvement in our financial aid package that we offer undergraduate students. The basic change we made was in the expected contribution by parents in the income range below $200,000. Students whose families make less than $60,000 per year do not have to contribute anything toward their student’s education. Those making between $60,000 and 120,000 have a sliding scale from 0 to 10 percent. And above $120,000 it’s more or less capped at mostly 10 to 12 percent of their income. It means that if your income is not in the top 5 to 10 percent in the United States you would get some form of financial aid. And of course, the same formula applies to foreign students. The overwhelming majority of foreign and international students who attend Yale today are on some form of financial aid. Now doctoral students, of which we have many from Korea, are all fully supported. They don’t pay any tuition and they receive living stipends as well; our entire Ph.D. program is fully funded. What percentage of the Yale student population is foreign? About 17 percent of the whole university and about 10 percent of the undergraduate population. Yale’s had a very special relationship with Asia historically. What is Yale’s specific interest in Asia? Also, does Yale have any plans to open programs or campuses in Asia? It’s true that we’ve had a lot of connections in Asia. We have had a long history in Asia going back to the 1850s. We have tried over the past couple of decades to cultivate relationships with the leading universities in China, Japan and Korea, and we have a summer program that brings students from Seoul National University to Yale as part of our summer school and that same program is involved with Tokyo University, Peking University and Wudan University in China. But we don’t really have a plan at this point to actually establish a branch campus. We’ve thought about it. I wouldn’t rule it out for the long-term future but it’s not something that’s on our immediate agenda. Korea in per capita terms sends more students than most countries to be educated in the United States. What are your views about Korean students? Our graduation rate at the college is about 97 percent. In my department - economics - we’ve had outstanding Korean students (going) back to the 1970s. A lot of Koreans would like to go to Yale, and a lot have the grades and the scores to do so. What’s the key to getting accepted? We have a hard time with Korean applicants. There are so many who have perfect test scores and very high grades. You’re always looking for evidence that students have the ability to be really distinguished intellectually or have great leadership potential that can in some way contribute to the larger society. I think the former criterion is the most important in graduate work. The latter criterion is the most important for undergraduates. You glean that out of other information - either recommendations that are coming from teachers, out of the essays that students themselves write, out of the scope and breadth and depth of their extracurricular activities. You try to put together an entire picture of a student. This is something a little foreign to Asian students. They’re more focused on just getting the grades and test scores so it’s actually hard to prepare them for undergraduate education in the United States to develop that well-roundedness that most of the top American schools are looking for. What went wrong that led to the current economic crisis? Leverage, leverage, leverage. About three times too much. What went wrong is essentially not enough attention on the part of the government to excessive leverage built up not only in the housing sector but throughout the economy. Even in terms of companies in manufacturing financing their activities by writing commercial papers on a weekly basis, this isn’t normal. How do you see the bailout affecting economic performance in the future? $700 billion is not nearly enough. If you’ve looked at what it’s taken to rescue a failing banking system, it’s much more often 20-30 percent of gross domestic product. And $700 billion is 5 percent of GDP. It’s got to be way more than that. So the worst is yet to come? Oh, yes. First of all, the initial proposal of buying the bad debt off the books of banks was ridiculously insufficient. If all that was wrong with the banks was poor liquidity, then swapping bad debt for cash might be fine, but if the banks were insolvent, you need more than that, you need an equity infusion. Is it still true that all professors have to teach undergraduate courses? We’ve managed to maintain that in the face of intense competitive pressure to deviate. Most of our other institutions, the household names, will make exceptions [to allow] some of their superstar professors to avoid undergraduate teaching because they want to concentrate on their research or their graduate students. We simply won’t compromise. If you want to come teach at Yale in the faculty of arts and sciences, we’re proud of that and it produces something very unusual in a faculty in a great research university that is highly committed to undergraduate teaching. I really believe we have that. Without naming names, you’re about to go to a summit of university chancellors, what are some of the things that you would applaud about Korean universities that they should maintain and what are some practices that should be avoided? The number one quality of Korean universities is the quality of the students that top universities get. There are many outstanding students in Korea. We get a lot of graduate students from Seoul National University and a fair number from Yonsei and Korea University. I think that there’s a sense that Korea is facing national issues with respect to universities and I think that due to these demographic changes there’s some overcapacity in the university sector, and that’s got to be painful. I don’t quite know what to advise on something like that but I would hope that in the process of consolidation and shrinkage there is not any effort forced on the sector by the government that will dilute the quality of the top institutions. One of the things that’s true in America, and I think is true in Korea, too, is that universities are at different levels in terms of the quality of students and the level of academic rigor of their programs. I think that’s actually good because it makes a college accessible to students of different ability levels; that’s not an enforced homogenous state of the quality of the institutions. Many European countries went through this in the post-war period and have actually ended up trying to enforce a kind of egalitarianism across these universities which are all state-owned in these countries. They’ve actually shaved the peaks, so they’ve got these great universities - many of the German universities were the best in the world before the Second World War - and they’re no longer distinguished at all. Universities that were once in the top 10 are now barely in the top 100. So an important lesson for Korea would be that, if you’re going to have to go through consolidation, let some peaks remain unaffected. You want to have some excellence in the system. Do you link admission with gifts? It’s a delicate issue. We certainly do not link admission decisions to actual or promised gifts to our endowment. You can’t buy admission to Yale or to most of our leading peer institutions. That said, there’s no question that we tend to give some weight to the children of alumni in the admissions process. We take 8 percent of our applicants overall and we take maybe 25 percent of our alumni applicants. By Ser Myo-ja Staff Reporter [myoja@joongang.co.kr] |
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