Since the Reverend George Berkeley established Yale’s first scholarship and fellowship funds in 1732, alumni, parents, and friends have generously added gifts to Yale’s endowment, opening doors for talented students who are dedicated to serving society and having a positive impact on the world. 

Yale’s Be the Key initiative has substantially accelerated this giving. Part of the larger For Humanity campaign, Be the Key seeks to raise $1.2 billion for student support, all aimed at keeping a Yale education affordable and accessible. An enthusiastic outpouring of gifts means the initiative will likely exceed this goal by June 2026, creating current-use and endowed funds for scholarships and fellowships in every part of the university, including Yale College, the Graduate School, and the professional schools. 

Thanks in part to this effort, Yale College was able to announce in January a significant enhancement to its financial aid program, which will go into effect for undergraduates entering in the 2026–2027 academic year. Under the new policy, Yale will offer free tuition to families with incomes below $200,000 and cover all costs of attendance for families with incomes below $100,000. 

Campaign contributions have also made the David Geffen School of Drama tuition-free, enabled Yale Divinity School to provide full-tuition scholarships for students with demonstrated need, and supported Yale School of Nursing’s Community Scholars Program, among many other achievements. 

The following five recent gifts are helping Yale meet its ambitious target and ensure that the promise of access and opportunity can be kept for students today and for generations to come.

The Carlos E. Alvarez Scholarship 

Carla Brozovich ’05 recalls with pride the moment she and her husband, John, shared with her father, Carlos Alvarez, that they had established a scholarship at Yale College in his name. “For a long time, my dad didn’t want to put his name on anything. He often made his own philanthropic gifts anonymously, or in the name of a friend or colleague,” Carla says. “But over time, he came to understand how inspirational it was for many people to see that someone with a Hispanic name could find opportunity in the United States, work hard, achieve success, and now give back to society in a meaningful way.” 

When she and John made their initial gift to establish the Carlos E. Alvarez Scholarship Fund in 2019, Carla believed there were students at Yale who would feel similarly inspired. 

The scholarship supports undergraduate students, with a preference for those who are from another country and the first in their families to go to college. In the Class of 2029, eighteen percent of students are first-generation and the overall class represents forty-six different countries. “My father admired and appreciated that the American university system can—at its best—act as a great equalizer,” Carla says. “If you provide the opportunity for somebody to go to a college like Yale, it opens up so many doors for them.” 

Alvarez passed away in 2024, and last year, the Brozoviches increased their commitment to the scholarship in his memory. Their gifts have now fully endowed a complete financial aid package for a student. 

“Part of what makes the Yale College experience so transformative is that it brings together students from such a wide variety of backgrounds who have many different perspectives to share with each other,” Carla says. 

John Brozovich adds that, like his father-in-law, he and Carla are champions of the liberal arts philosophy, which grants students the freedom to explore disciplines, discover where their aptitudes and interests lie, and determine how they want to contribute to society. “There is something very gratifying as a donor to know that you play a part in helping the university and helping an individual student’s journey, wherever it may lead them.” 

The Hugh H. Hoffman Yale Class of 1954 Scholarship 

After graduating from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, Hugh Hoffman ’54 spent the rest of his life in his beloved home city of Cincinnati, Ohio, where his family had lived for four generations. Still, he never lost his connection to his alma mater and remained an active member of the Yale Club of Cincinnati. In 2002, he drew a line from Cincinnati to New Haven with a gift to establish the Hugh H. Hoffman Yale Class of 1954 Scholarship Fund. For over two decades, the scholarship supported financial aid for two undergraduate students from Ohio, Kentucky, or Indiana studying the liberal arts at Yale each year, many of whom were the first in their families to attend college. 

Hoffman died in March 2023 at the age of 91, after a long career in investment advising and a lifetime of enthusiastic world travel. (He filled twelve passports with stamps from around the globe.) In his will, he left bequests to Yale and several of the Cincinnati institutions dearest to him. This gift from his estate has significantly augmented the Hoffman Scholarship Fund. For the 2025–2026 academic year, the fund is providing financial aid support for fourteen Yale College students from Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Current Hoffman Scholars are studying a range of majors, including history, art history, economics, political science, cognitive science, film and media studies, and classics. 

Moving forward, Hoffman’s extraordinary generosity will enable the fund to provide support for numerous students each year, in perpetuity. His farsighted investment in education will continue to be instrumental in attracting talented and dynamic undergraduates to Yale and ensuring that they can take full advantage of every opportunity on campus. 

The Peter Salovey and Marta Moret Data Science Fellowship 

Among the highest campaign priorities at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) is a simple but powerful idea: that the most important discoveries no longer happen within a single discipline but at the intersections between them. Bringing PhD students together across academic fields is essential to advancing Yale’s most ambitious research goals.

The new Peter Salovey and Marta Moret Data Science Fellows program is designed to facilitate this approach, uniting twenty PhD students from across fields to tackle complex challenges where data science plays a critical role. In doing so, it creates an environment for the kind of collaborative, curiosity-driven breakthroughs that define Yale.

Established with an endowment from a generous alumnus and named in honor of Peter Salovey ’86 PhD, Yale’s twenty-third president, and his wife, Marta Moret ’84 MPH, the fellowship program provides a structured way for Yale PhD students to complement training in their academic discipline with activities in data science. Fellows receive mentorship, professional development, and outreach opportunities as they engage with a wider community of scholars to address pressing challenges in science and society. 

All fellows are eligible for funding to support travel to conferences and workshops, participation in outreach events, and access to data storage and advanced research computing. In addition, a subset of fellows are selected for up to two years of stipend and tuition support in their home PhD program. This funding is particularly critical for PhD students in the sciences, where the onus of supporting their tuition, healthcare, and living stipends falls on faculty, who must secure external grants covering up to 80 percent of a student’s costs after the first few years of their doctoral program. 

“The field of data science has enormous potential to transform our world. We are extremely grateful to be able to launch this fellowship program, which gives students the opportunity to bring fresh perspectives to complex problems,” says Lynn Cooley, dean of GSAS. “By investing in our students this way, we are preparing them not only to advance scholarship, but also to shape the future of data science across academia, industry, and society.” 

The Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan Scholarship 

On Chapel Street in downtown New Haven, the Yale School of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) are located just one block apart. Adam Rose ’81 measures that distance from another perspective. “Becoming a professional artist is a difficult, decades-long, process. The school stands at its beginning, and the Gallery stands at its end,” he explains. 

Rose and his husband, Peter McQuillan, both avid art collectors and longtime supporters of YUAG, recently made a gift to Yale School of Art to establish a permanent scholarship in their name. 

“We have done a lot to celebrate artists at the end of their long and successful careers. It was even more exciting to help them gain a foothold at the beginning,” says Rose. “We consider it a true privilege to support students who have made a conscious decision at a young age to devote their lives to adding beauty to the world.” 

With this scholarship, Rose and McQuillan join the school’s effort to one day become debt-free for all students with demonstrated financial need. 

“With a three-to-five-percent acceptance rate, we want our current MFAs and our alumni to be able to focus on their art while here, without worrying about loan payments,” says Kymberly Pinder ’95 PhD, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the School of Art. “Adam and Peter enjoy supporting artists, so I thank them for their partnership and their big hearts in helping our students have fulfilling experiences on campus and beyond.” 

Alongside financial aid, a critical priority for Pinder has been to connect students and young graduates with the larger network of Yale alumni and increase exposure to the creative talent that is being developed, encouraged, and nurtured at the school. 

“The community that has grown around Dean Pinder has been hugely welcoming to me, as the spouse of an alum,” notes McQuillan. “Getting to know artists at the beginning of their professional careers has been one of the most enjoyable things Adam and I have done at Yale, which made creating a scholarship an easy decision.” 

The Deborah Berke Scholarship 

Deborah Berke, the Edward P. Bass Dean of the Yale School of Architecture (YSoA), aims to make YSoA one of the first graduate architecture programs in the US that guarantees enough financial aid for all of its students to graduate with no debt—a new paradigm for the school and for the wider field of architecture. 

Since the start of her deanship in 2016, YSoA has tripled the amount of aid it distributes to students, even as student need has continued to grow. Last year, 91 percent of the school’s 255 students received a need-based scholarship, and the average debt of a YSoA student upon graduation was approximately $41,000—a significant decrease from just four years before when it was $88,000. 

When Berke was awarded the 2025 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, one of architecture’s most prestigious honors, a group of enthusiastic alumni donors began raising money to establish a new scholarship fund at YSoA in celebration of her accomplishments. Fundraising has so far neared $3 million and is ongoing. 

Starting next fall, one master’s degree student from every incoming class at YSoA will be awarded the scholarship, which they will hold for the duration of their degree program, whether it be two years or three. Deborah Berke’s name will be added to the scholarship once she is no longer dean. 

“I am incredibly honored by and grateful for this generous commitment to supporting our architecture students as they build a better future for us all,” says Berke.