Yale Allegedly Pressured Suicidal Students to Leave School and Reapply
“Once you’re out, they cut you off from everything.”
This sounds pretty heartless. Just the sort of thing you would assume campus activists would protest.
The College Fix reports:
Yale pressures suicidal students to leave school, reapply
Yale University has pressured some students with severe mental illness to withdraw and required them to reapply in order to return, The Washington Post reported Friday.
A student identified as “S.,” who suffered from trauma following a sexual assault, attempted suicide in her off-campus apartment. When she woke up in the hospital, she was told by staffers that she would need to inform the university, against her own wishes.
“S” had “heard about other students being forced to leave because of depression and suicidal thoughts, and about the lengthy, nerve-racking reapplication process,” according to The Post.
Students who take a medical withdrawal must reapply for admission in a process that includes “demonstrating that they’ve addressed their problems,” according to The Post.
Paul Hoffman, director of mental health and counseling in Yale’s health program, “strongly recommended,” on behalf of Yale, that she take a medical withdrawal.
“S” left the university. She ultimately regained admission in a reapplication process that involved taking two courses at another university.
Other suicidal students who withdrew or contemplated withdrawing did not finish their degree.
Three months earlier, a Yale freshman had killed herself on campus after contemplating the costs of withdrawal, according to her family, the newspaper reported.
A few years before that, 20-year-old Luchang Wang flew to San Francisco and jumped to her death off the Golden Gate Bridge rather than take a second medical withdrawal from the university, authorities said, according to The Post.
A fourth student, Nicolette Mántica, was told by Yale that she had “no choice but to withdraw” after being hospitalized for mental illness, The Post reported. She attempted to apply for reinstatement but ultimately decided to transfer to Northwestern University.
Other students interviewed said “they’ve learned to hide mental problems and suicidal thoughts to avoid triggering withdrawal policies that they believe are designed to protect Yale from lawsuits and damage to its reputation,” according to the Post.
Students who are forced to withdraw also face the challenges of losing their student health insurance and university-sponsored counselor, the paper stated.
“My big question was how do I get therapy,,” Alicia Abramson, another Yale student who withdrew, told The Post. “Once you’re out, they cut you off from everything.”
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
“My big question was how do I get therapy… Once you’re out, they cut you off from everything.”
You pay for it, like normal Americans do.
Yale doesn’t care. Their satisfaction stats are way, way up.
She is already paying for insurance, but by forcing her to withdraw, Yale gets to save the cost of treatment, and keep the fees as well as the tuition costs.
Institutions end up hollow.
Institutions, to endure must pay attention to surviving, even at the expense of the values they’re supposed to be there for.
A University with huge operations, endowment, and presence in the zeitgeist is working hard to maintain those things, even if covertly. People moving through institutions — especially modern US Higher Ed — aren’t the point. They are fodder carrying associated resources like money, access, cachet, cultural recognition.
Once you realize that you’re a token they cash in for the stuff they really care about, you can work with these institutions without getting burned. Associate with them without knowing this, and you only benefit, indeed only survive, by accident.
If this might apply to other kinds of institutions only illustrates Higher Ed doing it’s avowed job, by accident, of course. (And by providing a negative example to learn from.)