Mar 05, 2015 04:24 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Yale University can afford to be as picky as it is with students, but it can also afford to be as generous as it is, but some students are still not happy with the school's financial aid practices.

According to the Associated Press, a group of students at the New Haven, Conn. Ivy League school organized a petition drive to get Yale to strike down student contribution. As it stands, students receiving financial aid from Yale are required to contribute as much as $6,400 per year to their tuition.

Tuition for the year $63,250, so the student contribution for those on financial aid comes out to about 10 percent of the bill. Yale also maintains that half its students are enrolled with need-based aid, the AP reported, as the school operates with a $23.9 billion endowment.

But making up that $6,400 is beyond challenging, the petitioners said.

"For me, it's been kind of stressful to be in the situation of having to give up my time, and seeing other people do extracurriculars, go to office hours," Cristobal Trujillo, a junior from Bakersfield, Calif., told the AP.

Yale's minimum wage for campus jobs is $12 an hour and Trujillo said working as much as 12 hours a week is barely enough to cover his tuition contribution. Ronald Ehrenberg, president of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, said Yale could eliminate student contribution altogether if they wanted to. Noting it is one of the select few that could, he said the school may be acting solely out of principle.

"Should students of limited means be expected to contribute to their education through working? That's not a question I can answer. I have my own views," he told the AP. "Any student who gets to go to Yale is both very talented and very, very lucky."

Yale currently admits about 6.3 percent of its applicants and that is not the lowest even in the Ivy League. Much is expected in the classroom from its students and having to work long hours to make up the difference left by scholarship money can be frustrating. Some petitioners were not even on scholarship.

"If it takes away from students experiencing this university for all that it is," Nicole Narea, a junior from Greenwich, Conn., told the AP, "that's a problem."

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