When Diana Orozco ’16 was applying to college, she wasn’t getting any help from her mother. Rather, her mom was too busy doing her own high school work.
“While I was writing my college admissions essay,” she said. “I was also helping my mum spell words such as ‘serious,’ in her own homework.”
A first-generation student whose parents were undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Orozco, who traveled from Los Angeles to New Haven two years ago, represents the new breed of applicants to elite colleges. Until the late ’60s, Yale and its peers were more extensions of prep school than campuses open to all.