During a recent conference call of an advisory board on which I sit, we discussed why the people on the board decided to join the organization.  In a nutshell, the group noted the following reasons:

·         To gain support and inspiration

·         To connect with like-minded professionals

·         To gain leverage within one’s own school by ‘de-personalizing’ ideas

·         To have an impact on the field

·         To gain knowledge through networks and research

·         To do what one can to make sure the industry thrives.

I also heard phrases like “nice to know it’s not just me facing a challenge,” “wanting to hear what others do,” “having thoughtful deliberation of best practices,” and “advancing the circle of sharing.”  Clearly, these are the keys for connectedness and improvement of individuals and organizations.

As the height of the financial aid season winds down for you, it is critical to take time very soon to de-brief the season’s activity and take stock of what you’ve learned in the process.  Whether it’s the success of a new initiative or policy, the challenge of inadequate funding, or the need for new parent education or communication strategies, understanding the gold stars and red flags of your season will help you improve for the next one.  Engaging internally on the ‘thoughtful deliberation of best practices’ ensures the continuous improvement of what your aid program is seeking to accomplish.

Beyond that, what you learn (combined with what you’ve learned over time) can become the nuggets that inspire and direct others in the spirit of advancing the external “circle of sharing.”  

A quote attributed to Confucius tells us that “By three methods we may learn wisdom:  First, by reflection, which is noblest;  Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and Third, by experience, which is bitterest.”   

I encourage you to share what you learn.  Lead others through what you’ve experienced to allow them to minimally reflect, possibly imitate, but ultimately determine their own experience based on the paths laid by others.

The community of financial aid professionals is full of leaders who’ve challenged old ways of doing things, who’ve come into the field with new eyes to see things in ways they’ve not been seen before, and who’ve mentored and coached others through unsettling times and situations.  The community of financial aid professionals does this for the same reasons my colleagues expressed above:  not only to make their own schools better, but to do what they can to ensure the industry, the schools, and the students they serve all thrive.

You can do the same – as many do— through asking and answering questions on listserves and other social media outlets and through sharing your best ideas and experiences at conferences and workshops.  This fall, SSS By NAIS will host the first national conference specifically designed by, and for, private school financial aid professionals.  To epitomize the hallmarks of professional communities noted above, the conference needs voices like yours to make the experience top-notch for everyone.  Think about what you’ve learned in your financial aid experience, whether it’s been a year (or less) or a decade (or more), and turn that into how you can lead your colleagues.

Some ideas for sessions you can lead at the SSS Financial Aid Conference include:

·         How To Run A Financial Aid Clinic for Families

·         Working With the Development Office for Financial Aid Fundraisers

·         Using Comp*Assist Online Data for Profiling Your Aid Applicant Pool

·         Effective Strategies for Working with Divorced Parents

·         Organizing Your Financial Aid Committee for Efficiency

·         Handling International Student Requests for Financial Aid

Submit a proposal for a workshop session and let’s widen our circle of sharing to its greatest diameter.   John Quincy Adams told us “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”  Take him up on it.

Each year, SSS By NAIS calculates the Income Protection Allowance (IPA) as part of our methodology. The IPA is used to protection family income needed to pay for basic household living expenses.  For the first time, this year’s IPA actually decreased in value. We want to make it clear that this is not an error or the result of changes in the way we calculate IPA.  While we originally made this announcement in the 2012-2013 Computation Manual (see page 5), some have asked for further detail on the adjustment to the IPA and why it decreased for this year.

 Below is a table that shows the difference in the IPA by family size in use this year compared to last:

All things being equal, a lower IPA means a higher parent contribution.  As one example, for a four-person household earning $100K, the PC increased $1,064 while the IPA decreased $1,098 over last year’s calculation (at $75K, PC increased $724, while at $125K, PC increased $1,242).  It’s important to note that there is not an exact correlation between changes in PC and the IPA – changes to other aspects of the methodology such as inflation or new tax tables are factors as well.  But with that said, the drop in IPA certainly increases the expected contribution from parents. 

So, why did the IPA go down by roughly 3%?   

As discussed in the Computation Manual on page 14, the IPAs we derive are based on the most recently available Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey (also known as CEX). The CEX details the amounts American households spend on annual living expenses of all types.  This is important because any change in the IPA itself does not necessarily reflect a change in inflation, but rather a change in the actual expense involved with maintaining a household.  In reality, inflation can go up while spending goes down and vice versa. Each July, we update the SSS methodology variables with the most recent government research. 

For this year’s calculations, we are using the 2010 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) data as a starting point.  For 2010, the CEX-reported 4-person household spending median was 3.4% lower than the same reported value the year before.  There was indeed a drop in what US families actually spent on their household costs.  As a result, the IPA itself decreased as well.  

Because we use 2010 CEX spending data as the baseline, one of the adjustments we make before getting to a final IPA is an inflation-adjustment to best project a current value. This explains, in part, why the IPA didn’t actually decrease by the exact same percentage as the CEX-reported spending amount.  The inflation-based measure is necessary because the CEX data is based on spending done at least one or two years prior.

If you’re interested, all of the CEX data is publicly available information on the www.bls.gov website. And as always, if you have questions or need more information, don’t hesitate to contact Mark Mitchell at Mitchell@nais.org or at 202-973-9766.

Earlier this month, I got selected for jury duty.  While waiting in the jury room, a few people struck up a conversation that turned to education reform and how to focus on high-achieving students who might otherwise be dragged down by the average, or low-achievers. Because I didn’t want to let slip anything that might get me selected to be the jury foreperson — I just listened.

Amidst the typical debate over issues such as class size, teacher preparedness/creativity, parent involvement, funding limitations, and administrative/political bureaucracy, the most memorable part of the conversation, for me, was when one young Latino man declared that it’s not always the school that can identify, or support, the average or low-achievers who could be doing better.  He confessed that when he was a student, he was mediocre, unmotivated, and inattentive to his future and would have likely floundered in school had he not been introduced to The Posse Foundation. He movingly reminisced about how that program bolstered his self-confidence and self-esteem to the point of applying for, and graduating from, college. 

All I could do was slyly grin and shed a tear (inside) as he shared his story because it sounded so familiar.  It was familiar to me because I had the same opportunity, benefiting from the combined efforts of the national A Better Chance (ABC) program and the Moorestown Friends School’s Camden Scholars program to access the best education to bring out the best of my potential.  Beyond that, it was familiar because I’ve seen and heard it time and again across the country through several direct experiences I’ve had in just the past few months:

September 14, 2011:  The 10th Anniversary celebration for the Prep At Pingree Program. After delivering a presentation to school leaders on the financial aid landscape in today’s economy, I was invited to a celebration banquet.  Listening to graduates and current students express how the program has catapulted them into atmospheres they didn’t think were reachable, was moving and inspirational.  Massachusetts governor Duval Patrick, also an ABC alumnus, delivered the keynote address, encouraging the students to continue to reach high and encouraging the program’s supporters to continue to provide the boost.

November 11, 2011:  Annual Queen City Foundation (QCF) Testing and Financial Aid Day.  Held at Cincinnati Country Day School (OH), over 120 families attended a three-hour financial aid workshop while their children took an admission entrance exam.  This year marked the 11th time that I presented the financial aid session for parents.  The sense of pride in, and collective hope for, their children were palpably obvious among the parents.  Their presence, attentiveness, and inquisitiveness were proxies for the sacrifices they know they will endure to provide the best education for their children. This event is always a truly moving experience for me, witnessing to what lengths parents will go for their children to succeed.

November 20, 2011:  Black Student Fund (BSF) School Fair.  Washington D.C.-based BSF hosted an annual gathering of thousands of families and scores of independent schools in its network.  Staffing a table to provide information and answers to financial aid questions, I was surprised by how much the students themselves (as young as seven years old) wanted to take control of their own future by having a better choice of where to obtain an education; not just blindly or begrudgingly following along behind their parents on a nice Sunday afternoon.  Hearing the kids’ own aspirations to attend the region’s best schools, regardless of their race or income realities, reflected the dreaminess of youth.
 
December 17, 2011:  Emerging Scholars Program Testing and Financial Aid Day.  This DC-based organization sponsored an event similar to the QCF testing and financial aid day, though on a smaller (but no less impactful) scale.  Before offering financial aid information for the parents, I was asked to speak with the group of students (about 15 or so middle-schoolers) about my personal experience having been in their shoes as a low-income inner-city youth nervous about taking a test to get into a private school.  At one point during the meeting, they recited (by memory) “Invictus,” the William Ernest Henley poem ending with the famous lines “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”  I encouraged them to hold onto that notion and to believe it throughout their lives:  you control your direction, not your circumstance.

January 27, 2011:  Moorestown Friends School (NJ) Board Meeting.  As an MFS board member, I was thrilled to hear from five students who attended the NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) as they reported to the board what they found to be the value of their experiences personally (“the best thing I’ve ever experienced in my life”) and what they brought back to school for others to benefit from (a proclamation affirming commitment to creating safe spaces for students to express and embrace the value of their differences).  Three of the five students are currently MFS Camden Scholars, affirming for me the “return on investment” of the need-based aid for those students, and of the impact that the NAIS People of Color Conference and the SDLC continue to have on students and on schools.

Many more of these moments happen wherever schools are located, either through formal or informal networks.  For all of us, they should reinforce and remind us that access and opportunity are not just buzz words:  they are life-changing concepts that are impossible to quantify beyond what the school ‘spends’ on giving aid to kids who need a lot of financial support.  When the financial support is called into question and constricts in “tough times,” so do the very concepts themselves.  When the relationships between schools and access organizations are called into question, so is the ability of schools to serve the ‘best and brightest.’

Historically, “access organizations” like The Posse Foundation have worked with schools to support thousands upon thousands of underrepresented populations with needed boosts to overcome financial, academic, and/or personal obstacles that otherwise would prevent their ability to enroll, and succeed, in private school settings (some help as much with paying rent as with teaching study skills).  Given the economic turmoil of the past few years, more and more schools lament having to restrict the kind of financial support for high-need, low-income students that many of these programs work with.  Donors and philanthropists also lament restricting their ability to support the expenses and grant/scholarship budgets.  Leaders of these organizations lament that the combination of a drop in both school support and donor-based giving means that fewer of these students are receiving the sizeable need-based aid offers that they used to see.  “Tough times,” sadly, conspire to restrict access for the very students for whom the times may be toughest, blocking a path built to help them overcome their circumstances.

It’s funny that I cannot remember what my fellow juror said he currently does for a living.  Perhaps that underscores for me that the outcome of his Posse (and my own ABC/Moorestown Friends Camden Scholars) experience isn’t about what college you go to, or what career path you end up taking (though those “measures” are often touted in judging program success).  What remains, ultimately, is how those experiences delivered more intangible values:  building self-confidence, self-expression, and self-reflection to embrace something about yourself that nobody else could either see or know how to bring out in you.  And using that self-awareness bolsters the belief that you deserve and can achieve something more than what you were otherwise led to believe you can achieve.  That’s the liberating power, in my opinion, of investing in “access.”  That’s the same spark I’ve seen whenever I come across parents and students, convened by access organizations, engaged in seeking the best chance to shine.  I certainly hope that the shroud of “tough times” doesn’t extinguish that spark as schools make admission and financial aid decisions this season. 

This month's blog has been guest-written by Patricia Hayden, Director of Professional Development for SSS By NAIS.  If you'd like to write a blog entry on financial aid issues, send an email to Mark Mitchell at mitchell@nais.org.

In my profession as a learning practitioner, I’ve often seen staff training be the first to go when financial times get tough. However, economically uncertainty is often the best time to train your financial aid practitioners to best meet the needs and challenges at your school.  All too often, training is considered optional because it is treated as an expense rather than as an investment. While training does involve upfront costs, it also represents a long-term strategy for growing and developing your staff and improving the operation of your aid program.

Why is it important to send your staff to a formal training? Your financial aid office likely manages one of your school’s largest budgets. It’s often second only to compensation with an annual budget of about $1 million at the average NAIS member school. Complicating matters, today’s financial aid practitioners wear multiple hats; yet, three months out of year, they must review and manage financial data – in some cases for several thousand families. It’s only with proper training that they can become good stewards of your school’s resources while addressing family needs at the same time.

It’s more important than ever to take a look at the training you make available for yourself and your staff.  Whether new or seasoned, those handling your financial aid dollars should have a solid grasp on topics and issues such as those covered in the SSS slate of training resources:

·         Understanding the basics of financial aid
·         Learning the steps and processes  for good award decisions
·         Customizing the methodology for determining ability to pay tuition
·         Developing sound financial aid policies
·         Exercising good professional judgment
·         Taking long-term views of financial aid issues
·         Using the Comp*Assist Online tool efficiently

Three key benefits of sending your staff to training include:

·         Increased employee productivity. In addition to learning how to complete new tasks and take on more responsibility, employees will learn advanced techniques to help them complete everyday tasks more efficiently. They’ll also connect with other practitioners for first-person insight into managing the challenges they face day-to-day.

·         Reduced turnover. Employees who don't receive guidance or have difficulty learning the ropes are much more likely to leave your school. Employees are less likely to leave if they have the opportunity to learn new skills and keep current with professional standards.

·         Improved job satisfaction. Investing time and money in developing employees’ skills makes them feel valued and appreciated while challenging them to become more vested in their jobs. Higher job satisfaction ultimately results in reduced turnover and higher productivity.

For those who already send their staff for training, we thank you for your commitment to professionalism.  I look forward to seeing some new faces in our upcoming face-to-face and online learning events.

On my way home from the office the other day, I was walking through Farragut Square and saw something a little strange.  A woman with a box of saltine crackers was feeding the crackers to a small group of little brown squirrels.  That’s not so strange.  But she was doing so standing next to a bench and on the bench was a homeless man, who appeared as if he could have benefitted from a gift of food. 

So it made me wonder, why did she decide to feed the squirrels instead of the man?  That question assumes a lot, I know, but it struck me, nonetheless.  Then it made me wonder further, how does anyone decide to help who they decide to help?  For example, I make my high school, Moorestown Friends School (New Jersey), my top priority for giving, but my college alma mater, Northwestern University (NU), has gotten very little from me over the years.  Why is that?  What’s my decision-making criteria on whom to help?

For one, I have a stronger emotional connection to MFS and have kept up with it as an alum more so than with Northwestern.  And I love Northwestern.  But I love MFS more.  Second, even though MFS has been around 65 years longer than NU (1785 vs 1851) I think MFS ‘needs’ my support more — an impression that’s pretty much based on the comparison of the endowment sizes of the institutions.  MFS is the squirrel and NU is the homeless man. Basically, the decision is based on a pretty subjective consideration of the degree to which heart-strings and purse-strings matter…and little else.  Who do I care about more, and feel is needier?

Of course, giving need-based financial aid is all about deciding who to help, and who you cannot help.  In the admission process, evaluating students without consideration of their financial need underscores the principled stance to keep the admission determination about qualifications and best fit.  But when schools eschew need-blind admissions to be at least “need-aware,” as some call it, schools choose not to grant access to a needy (or needier, compared to another) family.  The need-aware posture can lead to denying admission to students based on the school’s inability to offer aid, even if the student’s admissibility is strong.  It says, “Since you, Family 1, need more aid than Family 2, we can’t help you but will help Family 2 instead.”  Of course, the admission denial letter doesn’t read this way — but it’s the truth.

How do you make a conscious decision to not help someone who is actually in greater need of help gaining access?  What goes into making that decision?  How is it reconcilable?

Some say it’s best not to plant false hope in applicants if sufficient aid isn’t there, setting the parents up for having to say to the child, “Sorry we can’t afford to send you there.”  Some say those who take the offer without enough aid will become tuition collection problems at some point, thinking that things will work out when they frequently do not.  Some say it’s more fiscally responsible or sustainable to push more seats to full-pay (or mostly-pay) families, even if to a lesser-qualified applicant. 

 Inside Higher Ed recently published an article online ("Clashes of Money and Values:  A Survey of Admission Directors," September 21, 2011) reviewing a survey of college admission officers in which more of them agreed that “the recruitment of full-pay students” is more of a key strategy for them than “providing aid for low-income students.”  In that same study, the article states, “Ten percent of four-year colleges report that the full-pay students they are admitting have lower grades and test scores than do other applicants.”  So, this need-aware pressure is acute, real, and growing.

On the other hand, some say the admission decision should be separate from the financial aid decision, asserting that denying admission because of need is a betrayal of the families' trust in the admission process itself and that the student and family need to know that their child was actually good enough to be there.  Some say that denying admission because of need converts the school’s deficiency (not having enough in an aid budget) into the child’s deficiency (you’re too poor to be admitted) and deprives the family the opportunity to make the financials work somehow.  The most cynical say that it’s a subtle way to shape the balance of socio-economic diversity over time within the school for reasons that are not just fiscal.

The NAIS Principles of Good Practice that assert the financial aid and admissions decisions should be independent of each other notwithstanding, I say the pros and cons related to losing the need-blind stance really boil down to a single essential question:  “How can we consciously decide not to help someone exactly because they need the help the most?” 

Why can’t we feed the squirrel and the homeless man?  Something to think about as those admission applications come in.  Excuse me while I go send a check to Northwestern’s annual fund.

On Sunday evening, I watched an episode of “Til Debt Do Us Part,” a reality show focused on helping families conquer their financial troubles.  In this particular episode, a married couple with three children (let’s call them “Jones”) was earning well over $120,000 per year but couldn’t figure out where their money was going at the end of each month.  It turns out that they had two primary problems:

1. Mama Jones felt guilty about denying the children the things they wanted.  Thus, their  personal credit card debt was extremely high, as were the payments.

2. Papa Jones was tight-lipped about the state of the family’s finances and had trouble admitting to his wife that they were in over their heads.

What struck me most was that, as they sat around a kitchen table discussing the changes in spending habits they were about to make, one of the children asked if the family was poor now.  The father replied, “We not poor, we’re broke.”  In that simple statement, he captured the conundrum that many families face when applying for financial aid for independent schools:  earning plenty of money but finding less and less to spend on ‘extras’ as credit debt and other burdens eat away at the monthly intake. 

If the Jones family applied for financial aid, their estimated family contribution would be about $11,000 towards tuition.  At a day school that charges the NAIS-median high-school tuition of $21,150 and meets 70 percent of demonstrated need, the Joneses would qualify for a need-based grant of about $7,600.  This means they’d have to pay about $13,550, or 11.3 percent of their gross income. 

For many families in this income range, this would be a manageable sacrifice and commitment, even if not an easy one.  But for the family I saw on Sunday night, this would likely be an unmanageable “extra” for their budget and would yield an appeal for the school to do more, lest the child go elsewhere.  The pressures to enroll the student, appease “middle-class squeeze,” and gain net tuition revenue combine to likely move most aid offices to yield to the Joneses’ demand.  With tuitions increasing much faster than incomes over the past decade, higher-income families that increasingly become eligible for financial aid may also be increasingly vocal about expecting to get what they are due.  Meanwhile, aid administrators increasingly feel as if they “work for” the family, which simply expects a loosening the purse strings when asked. 

Does this create an ungrateful, entitled class of financial-aid families?

At face value, I don’t think so.  If the school offers aid and the family shows (or continues to show) eligibility for it, then, in a manner of speaking, the family is entitled to expect to receive aid without being required to show gratitude or appreciation.  This is part of what goes with the territory of financial aid work:  getting one or two heart-felt “thank you’s” each year serves as proxy for all the others.  Temper your expectation for gratitude, or other similar reactions from parents, because that’s not the end goal of the process.  Focus on how providing that aid helps the school, not just on how it helps the family.

But another question worth debating is more interesting to me:  Are schools doing what they can to educate families about where financial aid comes from, and to encourage them to give back in the future in order to sustain the aid program?   In other words, I’d be more inclined to feel like this:  “As a financial aid professional, I don’t need a ‘thank you’ from you today, but I sure could use a donation in the future to ‘re-gift’ the aid you got.”

Going back to the Joneses, the fact remains that, even if they feel they’re broke now, they recognize that they have the capacity to do more once they improve their standing a bit.  The Joneses remain a high-income family (at $120,000, they are in the top 20 percent of US families, according to US Census Bureau’s 2009 income data) and they may be able, more than most families, to return the help they get today with a gift to support other families later.  Does the school consider the Joneses a qualified prospect for future giving, repaying that grant to help others in the future?  How can that message get out?

Two thoughts:

1. Consider language in your brochure, award letter, and website such as: “This grant is a gift to your family from [school name] funded, in part, by the generous donations of our benefactors past and present.  To the extent you are able, now and in the future, consider how you can help future [school name] families receive the same gift of a [school name] education for their children.”  Highlighting how aid is funded and the degree to which charitable giving plays a role may help families see their own role in helping others as they’ve been helped. 

2. Consider how the financial aid and development offices can strategize more effectively.   Beyond merely discussing who should or who shouldn’t be on the annual giving solicitation list based on financial aid status, think more creatively about reaching these families.  For example, consider a special campaign that targets high-income financial aid recipient families or low-need families who needed short-term help to recover from a setback with a “pay it forward” type of appeal, after their child graduates.

While you cannot require gratitude for the gifts you give, you can take steps to help change the conversation about attitudes regarding the availability of financial aid from “entitlement” to “reciprocation.”  In doing so, maybe the Joneses will eventually help others keep up with them.

Year-end activities in the financial aid office may often include reporting to the board about the year's outcomes and setting the context for the future of your financial aid program.  This month's  blog is a reprint of an article I wrote for the April 2011 (inaugural) issue of "The Savvy Trustee," a new e-newsletter from NAIS for independent school trustees, to help spur communication between boards and their financial aid experts in-house.  Hopefully, you'll find it helfpful as well. Besides, it's good for you to know what we say to trustees about you and your work...

"Among independent school trustees like you, I like to think I occupy a pretty unique slot in the independent school community: an independent school graduate who received substantial financial aid to afford the school costs, who has also worked as a financial aid administrator helping families afford cost of education, and who is now a trustee of his alma mater in part because of the work he does nationally (and internationally) helping schools help families through effective management and delivery of financial aid dollars. It’s a beautiful circle.

All of these experiences give me insight into the perspectives of students, parents, administrators, and trustees as we collectively consider the very real and pressing issues of access, affordability, and enrollment management facing our schools today. Each of these constituents of the school communities we serve has strained and palpable concerns about managing tuition costs and supporting opportunity for students in a weakened economic climate that needs a measured look now more than ever.

In fact, very recently on an SSS By NAIS listserve for financial aid administrators, there was an interesting exchange started by one colleague who asked the group to share examples of reports they deliver to their boards about the financial aid program at their school. While the exchange yielded a clear hunger from other financial aid administrators for advice on how to speak to their boards about financial aid issues, perhaps the main thing that struck me was that the administrators were asking each other for guidance on what they should be presenting, instead of asking the school head or the board chair what the board would like to discuss or learn more about. (Granted, maybe they did that, too, but it wasn’t apparent).

It’s great to encourage solution-sharing among colleagues and I’m sure that many of them exchanged PowerPoint presentations and examples of spreadsheets, as appropriate. But addressing financial aid challenges is not a one-size-fits-all proposition that filling in the blanks of a template alone will adequately resolve or illuminate. Given the varying missions and cultures of schools, varying demographics of school communities, and varying levels of investment in financial aid support, such discussions and reports must be guided by school-level nuance and specifics that you can help frame.

If you haven’t had a financial aid director-led conversation about the financial aid program at your school in the last year or two (or more), schedule one soon. Work with the head of school to identify one or two specific areas of interest and/or a series of questions about financial aid of strategic importance to the board. For example, if socio-economic diversity is an important strategic goal for the school, it can become the “story” that needs to be told, and you might ask the financial aid director to consider and report out on questions such as: Do you think we’re achieving the kind of socio-economic diversity we want? If not, where do we fall short and why? If so, how do we make that sustainable in our demographic environment? What quantitative data support that? What are some of the qualitative stories about students/families that bring life to the issue/problem? What two or three recommendations do you propose the board should consider?

This gives guidance to the financial aid director for gathering and shaping the right type of information to support the discussions. Knowing as specifically as possible what the board needs to know about the financial aid investment will lead to a better use of time for everyone, as opposed to hearing a generic set of data or information that simply describes the status quo or that doesn’t highlight anything new. Simple updates of facts and figures can be delivered by email or in written reports but scheduling a board presentation is a whole different type of opportunity.

Granted, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know and financial aid matters are not typically “top of mind” at regular board meetings where capital campaigns, master planning, salary structures, or governance challenges might typically rule the day. Even if you know it’s important to be talking about financial aid, it might be hard to pinpoint the specifics without a good overview of where the school is and where it wants to be. In that case, let the day-to-day experts be your guide. Provide your director of financial aid the chance to exhibit leadership by probing what he or she thinks (or what the school’s financial aid committee thinks) are the successes and shortcomings of the way financial aid is supported and managed. Ask your financial aid officer to create the story about the financial aid program that would garner the support needed to help the school accomplish a couple of specific unmet goals. Give him or her leeway to pitch solutions or alternatives for you to chew on, but accompanied by the right set of data to light the way. Let him or her “crunch the numbers” and identify the most pressing strategic issue facing the school. For example, for some that issue may be that building socio-economic diversity is the biggest challenge not being adequately met and a recommendation on the issue may be to show how the board can support the ability to meet that challenge better.

For the typical NAIS member school, financial aid investment represents the largest line item after salaries and benefits. For the typical NAIS member school, financial aid allows approximately one-fifth of the students to enroll. And even so, for the typical NAIS member school, the financial aid budget is underfunded and facing increasing demand. You need to know whether this investment is meeting its goals, supporting the school mission adequately, and where opportunities lie to be more effective or to sustain the effectiveness you may have already achieved.

When the conversations and challenges about financial aid strategies are specific and clear, you’ll have a better shot at solutions and approaches that are most likely to be effective. Whether I’m peering at the issue through the student, parent, administrator, or trustee lens, that’s ultimately what I’d want to see."

Reprinted with permission from "The Savvy Trustee," Volume, 1, Issue 1, April, 2011, National Association of Indepedent Schools, http://www.nais.org/publications/savvytrustee.cfm.

I'm pleased to announce that this month's blog is written by Mike Szydlowski.  If you'd like to author a blog and share your thoughts and opinions on best practice, email it to me at mitchell@nais.org.   Thanks, Mike!!

I suspect that very many schools, boarding and day, have benefited from the explosion in interest from families in Asian, and other, countries.  I was struck by an article in the Washington Post (March 30, 2010:  “U. S Prep Schools push to recruit foreign students; parents eager to send teens abroad for coveted American diplomas” by Michael Chandler) describing the surge in enrollment of  foreign nationals in independent day schools in the Washington, D.C. metro area.  The article cites federal government data indicating there are 35,000 international students attending primary or secondary schools in the U. S., not including those attending one-year cultural exchange programs.  As we work to maintain full enrollment by targeting non-U.S. markets for talented students, I have become concerned that independent schools may be in violation of our own creeds in our financial aid practices for those students. 

Consider the following two slightly-less-than-purely hypothetical propositions: 

1)       “When we recruit international students, we only accept students from (name of country) if they are full-pay.” 

2)       “(Your school name here) admits students of any race, color, and national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school.  It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color or national or ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, financial aid and loan programs, and athletic or other school-administered programs.”

And let’s look at points (5), (6) and (9) from the NAIS Principles of Good Practice for Financial Aid Administration:

5)  The school determines eligibility for admission without regard to a student’s application for financial aid.

6)  The school commits to providing financial aid dollars to applicants who demonstrate that their family resources are insufficient to meet all or part of the total educational costs.

9)  The school enacts documented procedures that ensure a fair, consistent, and equitable assessment of each family’s ability to contribute toward educational expenses. 

So, my concern is this: Are we treating all foreign nationals the same with respect to financial aid and in accordance with our own creeds and principles of fair and equitable distribution of aid dollars? 

My sense is that financial aid is more readily offered to Europeans, Canadians, and Jamaicans, for example, while students of other nationalities (such as Chinese and South Koreans) may be more likely to be recruited only if they can pay full freight.  I completely understand that some schools simply have a policy that they do not offer need-based aid to non-U. S. citizens.  And we all know that verification of financial need is very difficult when reviewing requests for need-based aid from those who file a non-U. S. tax return (for that matter, it is increasingly difficult when it is a U.S. tax return!).  A further complication occurs when trying to determine the purchasing power of the applicant’s family income in the local currency. Although we have access to cost-of-living adjustment measures for U.S. families, comparable COLA data for non-U.S. cities are harder to come by.  While it may be defensible to restrict aid to U.S. families only, once you open the door for aid to some international families, it should be equally open to all of them.

If my hunch is true, this singling out of certain nationalities whose admission is based on their ability to pay our full tuition is a troubling trend.   And in some cases they even pay a ‘premium’ above tuition (see the recent article, “Dalhousie Medical School to sell Saudis 10 seats”, by James Bradshaw in the March 17^th, 2011 The Globe and Mail, reporting that seats costing Canadian students $40,000 are being sold for $75,000 to Saudis). 

All who work in financial aid know the enormity of the work we are tasked with.  And we all want to administer our need-based aid fairly and consistently with our school’s philosophy and within the guidelines of the NAIS Principles of Good Practice.  Like many of the topics that appear on the financial aid listserve, there isn’t a ‘right’ answer and it would be hubristic of me to suggest one here.  I just know that the idea of excluding a certain group from consideration for need-based aid makes me feel a little ‘icky’.

Mike Szydlowski is director of financial aid at Woodberry Forest School (Virginia).

At the NAIS Annual Conference in February, Dallas Joseph (Chief Financial Officer at Baylor School [Tennessee] and Chair of the SSS Advisory Task Force) and I delivered a presentation highlighting early findings of the SSS By NAIS 2010 State of Financial Aid survey.  You can read the various section summaries and read the full report at the SSS Knowledge Center.  There’s also an overview that presents 10 Key Findings.

But after going through the long process of reviewing, thinking, and writing about the results, I can’t resist sharing some thoughts with you. 

·         Not enough time. So many administrators (86%) reported spending less than half of their time on the work, with the average administrator spending just 24 percent of his/her time managing an increasingly complex role and responsibility.  Not having enough time to focus on financial aid tasks more is among the top challenges of the job (second only to lack of sufficient aid dollars).  This lack of devoted time to such a vital and growing part of building enrollment, generating revenue, and creating community is a bit worrisome.

·         Not enough training.  The “time poverty” issue plays a large part in a sort of “paucity of training” that exists in the field as well.  Most people don’t get trained when they start and believe they need more training but the top obstacle is finding time to do it (even more so than finding money to attend training).  This combination of “no time-no training-no focus” for the typical administrator seems to be leading people towards feeling like either “get this off my desk (i.e., let somebody else do as much of it as possible)” or “I am not able to spend as much time as I’d like to be confident in my decisions/awards.”   The sense of professionalism and the ability to be as effective as possible suffer as a result.

·         Shifting priorities.  Nearly everyone believes that access for high-achieving low-income students is financial aid’s most important objective, but many fewer believe they’re doing well at accomplishing that. Also, it’s pretty clear that diversity has taken a back seat to “affordability” as a primary goal these days. The economic climate in the past two or three years has certainly added pressure to transform the qualitative benefits of financial aid investments into more apparently quantitative benefits.  Just a couple of days ago, I had a conversation with a school head who stated that his director of admission and financial aid asked him, when discussing enrollment goals, “What’s my job here?  Am I finding the kids we want or finding the money we need?”   And it wasn’t a rhetorical question.

·         Great people, doing good things.  Financial aid work is in very good hands. Financial aid administrators are very well-educated, very committed to the mission-oriented foundational principles of financial aid programs, and primarily associate positive emotions with the work.  They are very concerned about making the best decisions that serves families and schools well and are willing to learn how to do this even better.  They don’t take the job lightly and appreciate fully the impact the work has on the lives of students, parents, and schools.    

There’s more to chew on in the report summaries.  My general take-away is that the complexity and expense of financial aid are growing but time and staff devoted to managing them are not.  As such, for many (or perhaps typical) schools, the state of financial aid management is far from optimized.  Stress is high due to competing demands, increasing applications, and more complex and sensitive family financial situations.

Given the nature and confluence of forces such as tuition, economy, demography, competition, and mission,  financial aid operations can no longer be viewed as a set of tasks organized around sending award letters between January and March and then on to the next thing.  It seems to me that school leaders would be well-served to consider that the cost-effectiveness of financial aid at their schools could be enhanced by freeing up time for administrators to understand and tackle more components of the work  that are long-term, bigger-picture, and systemic.  The climate calls for a greater commitment to professionalism, strategy-making, and leadership that so many financial aid administrators are willing and able to embrace…if only they had more time.