Joseph Howard is vp for enrollment at Widener College, a non-public nonprofit in Pennsylvania.
In fall 2024, undergraduate enrollment amongst first-year college students dropped by 5% in comparison with the yr earlier than, in accordance with new preliminary knowledge from the Nationwide Scholar Clearinghouse Analysis Middle. Most of that lower was because of fewer latest highschool graduates heading instantly to school than in earlier years, the clearinghouse discovered.
A number of dynamics are probably at play, together with the ban on race-conscious admissions and a few universities’ abandonment of test-optional practices. However one distinguished wrongdoer is simple: the fiasco surrounding the brand new Free Software for Federal Scholar Support.
As of Oct. 18, the botched 2023-24 rollout contributed to an 8.8% decline in purposes from the highschool class of 2024, equal to roughly 210,000 college students. It’s cheap to imagine a justifiable share of these college students merely didn’t matriculate and had been probably left behind by a damaged system.
Joseph Howard
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Anticipating these challenges, Widener College adopted a proactive method to monetary support. And we succeeded.
The FAFSA submitting charge amongst Widener’s home admitted pupil pool remained effectively above 70%, growing the variety of purposes acquired by 5% over the prior yr. We delivered greater than 2,500 financial-aid provides inside every week of the Training Division’s inexperienced gentle and enrolled Widener’s largest undergraduate class in its historical past.
Our expertise exhibits that establishments can actively promote school entry regardless of the disruptions attributable to FAFSA adjustments. With the U.S. Division of Training indicating the 2024-25 FAFSA will not be absolutely out there till Dec. 1, we encourage different establishments to think about among the methods we deployed.
Interact your campus group
It takes a whole campus to recruit a cohort of scholars. To your group to be efficient companions in that course of, transparency and common communication are key. Our campus started getting ready for a delayed timeline in September 2023. For our school and employees, we framed this disruption as one of the vital consequential adjustments in greater schooling in a long time.
Amid this sense of urgency, sturdy partnerships and artistic considering rapidly emerged. As an example, our school and educational leaders labored to reassess the timing of our marquee occasions for admitted college students. These occasions present an important alternative for college students and households to fulfill with monetary support professionals and evaluate their monetary support provides — however this requires support packages to be out there. Understanding that monetary support knowledge could be launched far later than regular, we elected to postpone these occasions.
We then discovered that the Training Division wouldn’t meet its purpose of a Jan. 31 knowledge launch to high schools — with only a day’s discover. We once more took motion, making the choice to abandon Widener’s Might 1 resolution deadline. This affected every little thing from orientation timing and new pupil advising to the registration course of and course part. If not for the spirit of partnership we nurtured, group help for such a major resolution may need been stymied.
Talk, talk, talk
In our FAFSA solicitation efforts, we pivoted from a transactional outreach method to at least one based mostly on partnership. We acknowledged college students’ and households’ confusion and frustration upfront and sought to guarantee them that we had been within the course of collectively.
We dedicated to protecting college students knowledgeable amid abrupt adjustments, software program bugs and delays. Along with a public-facing college webpage, we supplemented outreach with TikTok movies that includes our financial-aid crew, ongoing digital occasions for FAFSA help (for all college students, not simply our candidates) and messaging to highschool counselors.
We additionally communicated with tenacity and selection. Postcards, textual content messages, electronic mail and one-off outreach by admissions counselors had been staples in our toolkit. Our advertising and marketing crew tailor-made its digital outreach technique and delivered our messaging on to college students and oldsters via their social media streams. And we communicated at scale — the median admitted pupil acquired 28 discrete factors of engagement from Widener particular to FAFSA submitting.
Empower admissions as monetary support companions
Too usually, monetary support processes are thought-about separate from the broader admissions and recruitment journey. We generally heard admissions counselors categorical uncertainty about monetary support machinations, making feedback to the impact of, “We ship them to monetary support however don’t know what occurs after that.” The inverse was additionally true — colleagues in monetary support had been unclear about what college students had been listening to from their admissions counselors and seeing of their admissions portals. Bridging these divides with shared experiences, terminology and assets was key to making sure Widener spoke with a standard voice.
We additionally pivoted to deal with the urgency and forethought that may be required of our monetary support crew once they lastly acquired FAFSA knowledge and will end packaging support. Admissions partnered with our advertising and marketing crew and took duty for our FAFSA-outreach efforts. We added FAFSA-filing indicators in our admissions system, giving admissions counselors entry to that data. We additionally added it to our school’s admitted-student rosters and gave every admissions counselor a filing-rate purpose for his or her pupil inhabitants. The FAFSA course of grew to become a necessary level in conversations with college students and highschool counselors.
Shifting these duties ensured that our financial-aid colleagues — with help from our IT crew — may prioritize preparation for financial-aid packaging and conduct crucial testing of packaging formulation. We needed to be ready to roll out support as rapidly as attainable.
Working collectively to attain our missions
We’ve got the privilege of working in an business that adjustments younger individuals’s lives. With that comes a duty to make sure that each pupil has the financial-aid help they should entry a university schooling. Working collectively to assist college students find out about school affordability is crucial to that mission — for all of us.
