Approaching Transparency in Financial Aid
A Case Study Interview with Anna Jablonski, Interim Vice President of Enrollment California Institute of the Arts
For decades, American colleges and universities have engaged in common financial aid awarding practices that look similar from school to school. Of course, schools have different tuition rates, amounts of available scholarship funding, and philosophies of how to award that funding. But the similarity lies in the awards schools have offered, in that they gave the highest awards to the most academically promising students and some need-based aid to supplement what the family, state, or federal government was not able to cover. For decades, the merit scholarship awarding was somewhat arbitrary, as defining “academically promising” and assigning an amount of merit scholarship is a subjective process. However, that was of little concern to students because when tuition rates were relatively low, what wasn’t covered by merit scholarship could be covered by the combination of family, state, federal funding, and institutional need-based aid.
Over the years, many schools moved away from this process and toward a process that was somewhat less subjective and incorporated scholarships connected to GPA, SAT/ACT scores, and class rank—all of the indicators historically used to predict a student’s likelihood to succeed in college and beyond. However, this kind of movement toward objective awarding practices was more difficult for performing and visual arts institutions to adopt because the audition or the portfolio often outweighs test scores and GPA as measures of a student’s “merit” or “promise”. So as many of the colleges in the US evolved to become more objective in their awarding practices, many of the niche performing and visual arts schools did not.
For many schools of visual and performing arts, the process continues to feel arbitrary to students. In many instances, students simply accept the process, as they feel fortunate simply to be admitted to a top-performing or visual arts school. Often, they feel doubly fortunate to get any scholarship at all. But as times change, and a new generation of students are enrolled in our conservatories and schools of art, this level of acceptance of the age-old practice of traditional awarding is beginning to erode. In a recent music school survey of incoming students that was shared with me by a colleague, in addition to the annual complaint of not getting enough scholarship, students have expressed a new concern of not knowing how scholarship decisions are made.
As school tuition has increased over the years, and state, federal, and school-based funding have not kept pace, it has created a situation where many schools can no longer meet financial need. When financial need cannot be covered by all available resources, decisions have to be made by the school as to who gets what funding. Schools are faced with this very difficult question, “If financial need will be addressed for some but not all students, then how will such funding decisions be decided?” For these schools, often the real question is not, “Who gets what funding?”, but rather, “Who doesn’t get enough funding”?
As more and more students are offered financial aid that does not cover the cost of attendance, and schools are more and more expecting students to find their own way to cover the widening “gap” of unmet financial need, increasingly students are asking “How was that decision made?”. As they ask this question and tuition and the unmet need gap rises for students with measurable financial need, they often do not get satisfying answers from the schools they attend. With lots of questions going unanswered, increasingly it is becoming more clear to students how much lack of transparency there is in the financial aid decision process.
One school is addressing this challenge head-on: The California Institute of the Arts, aka CalArts. So, I sat down with Anna Jablonski, the VP of Enrollment, and asked her to share more about how CalArts has recently changed its awarding practices and become more transparent with students along the way.
CalArts recently made a decision to radically change the way financial aid is awarded to undergraduate students. What led to this decision?
The students protested, led by a group of graduate students. It spread quickly, and they wanted to know how their financial aid money was being determined. They were very frustrated by the cost of tuition. Tuition had just gone up again, so they launched a very public protest and demanded that we look at how we were spending their money, and they demanded transparency. They came to a board of trustees meeting and convinced the board to vote to examine how we work financially, with an eye toward need-based aid, specifically, identifying transparency as one of the most important factors.
How is the way you award financial aid changing?
Graduate student awarding has not changed yet. We started with undergraduate awarding. What we’ve done is decouple merit and need-based aid. We have merit awards that are specific and assigned to a specific percentage of students.
Only 30% of undergraduates will receive merit scholarships. We have that clearly stated on the website, that merit is an honor, it is rare, it's 30% of incoming students, and it’s $10,000 a year. Then, the next big chunk of money goes strictly to need-based aid. And this is calculated using a formula that is programmed into our awarding system. Essentially a student will get merit or they won’t get merit, and then if they submit their FAFSA, we will award any federal aid they are eligible for and fill in the gap until they reach $30,000 of unmet need.
Then there is a third step in the process, which is the squishiest part. The grey area. This is where it goes back to the schools of CalArts to strategically award additional funds on top of the need and merit. We know that some students, whether they are international students or whether they are students with very, very high financial need—maybe they are an independent undergraduate that does not have access to parent PLUS loans—whatever the reasons—it could also just be that the program they are entering is very, very competitive. So we take into consideration a variety of factors and we are awarding what we call “access grants”.
First, you have the merit scholarships, which are to honor the accomplishments of the students. Then you have the equity grant, which is to level the playing field, by bringing everyone across the board to more or less the same financial need. And then there is the access grant, which is awarded in collaboration with the school and the enrollment office, essentially to open the doors to CalArts for greater access to CalArts for students who need something extra above and beyond what they are getting through merit or equity. The access grant can be financial aid, it can be exceptional merit, this can be to further support diversity to make sure that we have a range of voices in the cohort that we are bringing in, and it can also be to ensure balance across the programs. For example, if we are bringing in 100 actors, how many designers are we bringing in? We’re making sure that we are able to keep the classes balanced. It is kind of the practical piece of the money.
And this is all on the website. Students also see the breakdown of their financial aid award. For example, it might say, “You got $10,000 of merit, $10,000 of access, and $10,000 of equity”. And if they don’t know what that is, they can go back to the website and read about how that was determined.
Very good! How were awards made in the past?
It was a need-informed merit practice. A student would be admitted and a faculty committee would assign rankings and also provide comments for the financial aid liaison for that school. The financial aid liaison would then look at the financial need of each student based on the FAFSA or based on what the student was reporting and decide the award. If they were an international student, or if they did not submit the FAFSA for some reason, they would make a determination based on what they thought they needed to give the student in order for them to enroll.
It was really kept much squishier?
All the way around. There were some funds that were set aside for need-based grants, but it was minimal. The bulk of the money was being awarded by the schools on kind of a sliding scale, based on your portfolio ranking, based on your financial need, and based on how much they wanted you in the class.
How is this new way of awarding financial aid being communicated to students?
When we started writing up the materials for new students, we were extremely detailed. We were going so far as to define what is “unmet need” and how do we calculate your unmet need. We were very granular in how we were talking through it. As we started to shop-around the text and talk to students, it became very clear that we were giving them too much information and it was confusing.
Even though we’ve decided that we are going to give equity grants to bring down student need to $30,000 of unmet need, to try to explain to an 18-year-old what $30,000 of unmet need means, and what does it mean if you’re looking at the cost of attendance or the cost of tuition only, it just didn’t make sense to them and they were getting lost. This level of detail was taking away from the intent of what we were actually doing. The intent is to make sure students understand how and why they are getting this money.
So we have taken out all of the granularity of the details and just broken it down into different steps. The first step is, you get admitted to CalArts. If you’re admitted, you will be considered for a merit scholarship. The second step is you submit a FAFSA. If you submit a FAFSA, we will award you all of the money you are eligible for and then you’ll get some equity money based on the need. Then we’ll kick it back to the school, and you might get a little extra to help make it more accessible to you, and then you get your financial aid award. If you have questions, then come back to the financial aid office. At that point, the aid office can walk a student through the appeal process, or connect the student back to the financial aid liaison to ask how the access grant was determined. And we do have four or five bullet points under merit scholarships and under access grants on the web so that students can see what, generally speaking, goes into making these awards.
I did work with the financial aid liaisons of each school, in addition to the general bullet points that we agreed upon that are representative of what is happening across all of the schools, each school has a more detailed list of talking points that they can use when they are walking the student through how that award was determined.
There are many different ways that colleges tackle the way to award students. How did CalArts arrive at these changes as the right thing to do?
Two years of committee meetings! (laughs) There was a lot of data. The data team pulled several years of data and looked at basically how much did it cost to enroll a student, what were the scholarships within each school that were yielding students, and then what the scholarship levels were among students who were graduating versus students who were withdrawing. The data told us that it didn’t matter how much money we gave students at the point of admission… they would come to CalArts.
But… there was a very clear threshold, around $30,000 - $35,000 of unmet need, where they wouldn’t graduate. They’d come to CalArts no matter how much money we gave them, no matter how much unmet need they had, but at $30,000 of unmet need, there was a steep decline in the retention and graduation rates. Then we used that to build a philosophy that would look at evening that unmet need across the schools.
We were also able to see in the data that what students were saying about the capricious nature of the awards was true. The merit awards were really all over the place. A “Rank 1” award in one program, might look very different than another “Rank 1” student in the very same program.
We then took that data and looked at it through the lens of five different models. One was the model that we were currently using, and we looked at other models that were common at other schools. The need-only model, the open-admissions model, a consultant model, and then the hybrid model.
And the hybrid model is what we landed at after a lot of discussion with student groups, with the shared governance of the institute, and then we went to work implementing it. Once we had agreement on the hybrid model, we did more modeling to see how much could we afford if we still have a 30% discount rate, what does that mean for the amount of money we have to work with?
Then the pandemic happened. And so we had to do a lot of work to make sure the model was going to hold even if students had increased need. We basically ran all of the same calculations on the group of students that enrolled in fall 2020 to see if the same numbers would work. If we look at fall 2019, we could see this is how much money we would need to run this model. We ran the same model using fall 2020. So we used this information to package the fall 2021 class, and are keeping our fingers crossed!
When the decision-making process was opaque, students were upset because they didn’t know what was going on, and wanted it to be more transparent. And now, you have a new process and you’re very transparent. Do you have any concerns about those changes? Do you think this could possibly lead to more frustration by students, perhaps disagreeing with an awarding philosophy that they now understand?
I don’t. I don’t actually. I don’t have concerns because [of] my experience over the past several years talking to students and very often telling them “No.” If they are talking to me, it’s because I’m usually telling them, “You can’t have more money, and this is why you can’t have more money.” So, anytime I’ve turned down a student’s appeal, I will tell them exactly why we are turning down the appeal. And more often than not, the student will thank me profusely. Even though I’m telling them “No”, because they just want to know why.
Right… that’s what’s been missing!
Right, so they know upfront, ok, only 30% of students got chosen for merit. Well you know, they can go and ask their faculty, “Why didn’t you think I was good enough to be ranked in the top 30%?” Maybe they’ll do that. I don’t know [if] that is something they are going to do. They don’t necessarily want to know why they weren’t as good as the other students. The information is out there and available to know that, “I just wasn’t in the top 30%.” “Why is my need award this much?” It’s very clear for them to walk through. “Why didn’t I get an access award?” Well, these are the criteria that we used to determine it, and unfortunately, Character Animation is a very, very difficult program to get into, and we just didn’t have enough funding there to increase your award.
So just being really open with them about why that decision is made. I think this will work. There is also an appeals process. And again the appeals process is going to be pretty clearly based on need. If the student doesn’t get an increase, we can say very clearly to them, “We understand that you still have unmet need. We understand that CalArts is still very expensive, but your need is not out of line with what other students are coping with, and let's talk you through other ways of filling in that gap.”
Another thing students get upset about related to financial aid is tuition increases during their time as a student. How are you being more transparent about that?
We tell students upfront that we expect tuition to go up 3-5% every year. And that their scholarship will not increase in relation to that (with a few exceptions… if you have a full-tuition scholarship it will go up). We have also posted anticipated tuition for the next three years online.
Is there anything that you want to elaborate on, that we haven’t covered today?
International students are a concern because they are not eligible for the equity grants, and we admit international students that have financial need. We are in an ongoing conversation about how to first assess the financial need reliably, and then how do we address it?
We’ve been using the CSS Profile for international students that are appealing. We find that it is not as reliable a tool as the FAFSA. That’s an ongoing conversation, and there is certainly some risk here to how this might change our population of international students...and that is something we are really attuned to.
We set aside the international grants, so that if you are an international student that is not selected for a merit scholarship, you will get a letter that says, “You weren’t selected for a merit scholarship, but we understand that some international students still need help getting to CalArts. Please fill out the CSS Profile, and the top 10% of international students with financial need will get an additional $5,000.” They are also eligible for the access grants.
That is still an open question. Any time you move to a very structured system, you lose the flexibility to deal with the exceptions. So, it's about making sure that the structure is sound and reliable, and then from there we can start to think through, for example, “How do you address the DACA student who does not have access to federal aid? How do we address the independent undergraduate who does not have access to a parent loan to fill in the gap?” There are these small populations of students who we know really struggle, and we want to make sure that we have enough money set aside in the appeals fund, and that we have enough room to work with them, and enough bandwidth to be really hands-on, and in deep conversation with them, and make sure we really do understand what their situation is, so that we don’t lose those students. Or more specifically, so that we don’t enroll them and then have them drop out because they can’t figure out how to fill in that unmet need.
As Anna and I finished our conversation, I was struck by what a monumental sea-change this must be for CalArts. I am impressed by the willingness of CalArts to move toward such a transparent model of financial aid awarding. Kudos to CalArts for recognizing a problem and addressing it head-on.
If you want to know more about CalArts or their scholarship programs, I encourage you to visit their website at www.calarts.edu. Specific information Anna references on the website can be found here:
https://calarts.edu/tuition-and-financial-aid/financial-aid/for-bfa-students/scholarships-grants
