Allocating Financial Aid to Achieve Enrollment Balance
It is commonly understood that institutions of higher education are going to utilize the financial aid they offer for many purposes. These include:
The use of merit scholarship to reward talent, academic achievement, artistic promise, etc.
The use of need-based grants to level the playing field for those students who may not be as financially well off as the average student, or to make the school affordable for anyone who might not otherwise be able to afford the cost of tuition.
The use of donor-funded scholarships to honor the interests and requests of the donors who gifted the funds to the college in the first place. These funds can be for general use, but often go to students with specific characteristics, either representing a specific demographic, pursuing a particular major, or possessing some other trait(s) specified by the donor.
When combined, these various types of scholarships often help produce a diversified student body. However, without careful analysis, planning, and a strategy, this type of awarding rarely leads an institution to achieve its desired balance. If college administrators consider the three funding types mentioned above, most do not initially offer a balanced amount of funding for each of these three categories. With this approach, the category that is best funded is likely to achieve the majority of the enrollment and is likely to put a school’s enrollment out of balance.
So, how to achieve balance then?
SCHOOLS MUST FIRST IDENTIFY WHAT KIND OF BALANCE THEY ARE AFTER.
Balanced enrollment comes from identifying an ideal enrollment and achieving it. Ideal enrollment likely sets specific numbers of students in specific majors, so that all programs are healthy. A good plan for balanced enrollment also likely has geodemographics and a general sense of diversity in mind. Allowing for a balanced representation of students racially, ethnically, geographically, as well as financially diverse representation should all be part of the “balance” plan.
RECRUITMENT AND MARKETING EFFORTS MUST MATCH THE BALANCE PLAN.
Once a balanced “ideal enrollment” is identified, a college will need to match its admissions efforts to recruit this balance. It seems counterintuitive, but many colleges do not match their recruitment efforts with their plan to achieve a balanced enrollment. College recruiters who are just concerned about achieving a specific headcount, often recruit wherever the fishing is good. If a specific high school or geographic area produces an enrollment headcount and paying “customers”, schools can be reluctant to risk recruiting in unknown territory that might help with balance but might not achieve the desired enrollment headcount. So they continue to follow what works. This is, in part, why so many colleges are so homogeneous. Once they’ve identified where to get students, they keep going back, repeating behavior that works for total enrollment headcount but does nothing for balance. Recognizing admissions and marketing behavior as part of the solution is key to being able to utilize your financial aid dollars to achieve enrollment goals. Achieving balanced enrollment is a team effort, not just the responsibility of financial aid. Breaking this cycle of admissions and marketing practice, funding these offices appropriately to do their job, identifying real goals, and matching the effort and behavior to the balance goal are the most difficult challenges of achieving enrollment balance.
SCHOLARSHIP AND FINANCIAL AID SUPPORT MUST MAKE AN EDUCATION AFFORDABLE AND COMPETITIVE.
To achieve balance, financial aid needs to accomplish four primary objectives:
Make the final cost of attendance affordable
Make the final cost of the education worth its value
Make the student feel “loved, supported, and desired”
Keep relative pace with competitive offers from other institutions
The challenge in accomplishing these four objectives is that an institution needs to have enough funding relative to its tuition rate to maintain control over these objectives, and an institution needs to be able to segment its effort to achieve balanced representation of the students it seeks. Creating financial aid offers that help achieve balance racially, ethnically, geographically, and financially requires a financial aid awarding plan that accounts for the differences of these various segments of population. Unless a school has the funding to offer their education for free, the school needs to have a plan that is most effective relative to the balance the institution seeks. Simply put...one size does not fit all.
THE VALUE OF AN EDUCATION AND SUPPORTING FUNDING MUST BE IN PLACE.
The value of an education is the relationship between price and the actual quality of the education. This has to be in place and must be communicated to applicants if the college hopes to enroll them.
In creating a balanced enrollment plan, trustees need to understand that although balance is a strategy and a goal to strive for, there are forces that conspire to prevent it, even with the best strategies in place.
From a student’s perspective, the condition of the economy, the cost of attendance, the place of each of a school’s academic offerings among its competitors, and how successfully a college communicates its value all play a role in a student’s final decision to attend or not.
The college must make decisions to position the price and the quality of education and spend an appropriate amount of money to recruit, attract, and enroll a balanced student body. All of these elements have to be in place… along with enough scholarship support. So while this article speaks of using financial aid to achieve a balanced student body, to be clear, unless the pillars of marketing, recruitment, and value are in place, achieving the goal of enrollment balance will be an uphill battle.
As difficult as this all may be, whether marketing and recruitment funding is adequate, or the value proposition of an institution is in place or not, these challenges shouldn’t keep us from trying to achieve a balanced enrollment and “to try” means that we need to build into the financial aid strategy the following components:
A clear value proposition so that even if your school is not the least expensive, it is worth its value and compares favorably with the competition. The education your institution offers is possibly worth a higher price tag after all financial aid is awarded. This proposition needs to be effectively communicated to students and families at every stage of the admissions funnel.
A marketing and recruitment plan designed to attract the balance you seek.
Enough merit scholarship to not only compete with other schools for whom your average students will command the top scholarship, but also to cover “status” awards for students who can easily afford your school, but would not come if no scholarship were offered at all.
Enough need-based scholarship to meet the unmet need of all students who demonstrate financial need. This requires a balance between your financial aid and your tuition and the number of financially needy students you perceive to be a part of your balanced enrollment plan.
When each of these components is in place, and an institution has trustees and general leadership who are willing to embrace change and strive to improve the value of what is offered, then the college is well on its way toward achieving a balanced and diverse student body.
Robert Borden is the President of BFE Blueprint and co-creator of the Blueprint Strategic Enrollment Planning Tool. Over the past two decades, he has worked with niche colleges, especially in the performing and visual arts, and has effectively served to assist each school find and enroll talented students and attain the school's student enrollment goals.
