The financial obstacles to accessing higher education are well-known. There are often very real barriers for students to having an open choice in selecting an institution. However, there are often resources and options available to students to help improve accessibility and college affordability, but it is the families who most need them that are the most confused, and have the most trouble accessing them.
This is acutely troubling when these families represent a growing enrollment segment at most institutions. Our ability to connect these families with necessary information to not only inform their enrollment decisions, but their financial decision-making across their higher education, will dramatically affect enrollment, persistence, and student success at our institutions—especially of our most vulnerable populations—in the coming years.
This resource is part of the Clearly Communicate Price and Financial Aid Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
Why does college affordability matter?
The college financing system is rarely transparent and easily understood by prospective students and their families, least of all by those most in need of this information—low-income and first-generation college students. There is a lot of information out there—from a variety of sources—but it is often confusing to know where to look for it, and even more difficult to distill it down into what it actually means for a specific student or parent. This means that many students and families simply aren’t connecting with many of the resources available to them, and making decisions about enrollment based on incomplete information.
Case study: creating a College Affordability Academy at Robert Morris University
“The idea behind the CAA was to transfer the information that’s available on a national basis, and put it into chunks that would help the teams across the university have valuable information that they could share at the point in which people need it, and when they’re listening. One of the biggest challenges for all of us is to catch people when they’re listening, because it’s a very noisy environment. But the admissions counselors, and financial aid staff, and retention officers, and people around the campus, are connecting with students at a time in which they’re interested in listening.”
Wendy Beckemeyer, VP of Enrollment Management at Robert Morris University
In 2014, Wendy Beckemeyer, the VP of Enrollment Management at Robert Morris University (RMU) developed and launched the College Affordability Academy (CAA), a training initiative for admissions counselors, financial aid officers, faculty mentors, and student support staff to make the college financing system as transparent as possible for prospective students and their families.
These are the people who are interacting with students and their families at critical touch points – when they are paying attention and often making significant financial decisions—and she saw a huge missed opportunity to leverage these interactions to provide more information to students. The goal was to provide data about resources and key topics in financing higher education to frontline staff so they could then insert this information into their interactions with students.
The pilot cohort of the CAA consisted of eight modules. The sessions all took place between December and February, so that they could impact the financial aid process that year. Wendy outreached to people that interacted heavily with students and she thought would be interested in the program. In the end, there were 50 pilot participants, including admissions counselors (freshmen and transfers), financial aid staff, online counselors, career development staff, black male student services, and alumni relations staff.
50
The outcome of the CAA is for anyone involved in the recruitment and enrollment process to be able to provide prospective students and their families with unbiased information about a range of money questions, not only to help direct their enrollment decision, but inform their decisions to take on debt, and think about how the decisions they make across their time at the institutions impact the debt they’ll leave with, and their lifetime earnings.
Wendy researched and developed the curriculum for the CAA largely herself, but leveraged outside expertise where appropriate. After deciding what the modules would be, she did research for each one, often reaching out to others on campus—including finance staff, deans of the business school, and their retirement plan representative—to vet the information she found. She also had the career center review the career-focused sessions.
Components of RMU’s College Affordability Academy
The final CAA curriculum consisted of eight modules, which combined individual work with group sessions, culminating in a capstone project:
- Participants complete a reading assignment and watch a video before each session
- Participants attend eight topic-focused sessions, 1.5 hours long each (participants are required to attend at least seven sessions to “graduate”)
- Sessions are a combination of presentation and participant interaction, starting with a PowerPoint presentation and a discussion of the pre-reading, then incorporating some interactive exercises participants work through together
- For example: during the “Debt Management” module, participants each go through the exercise of taking the Risk Assessment Tool on Rutgers’ website, and then discuss how their own attitudes toward risk affect how they counsel families
- Participants are required to complete a capstone project, and are given time in each session to work on it; participants were broken into six groups and tasked with making a deliverable that translates what they learned in the academy to prospective students and families
- Participants complete a final, four hour, capstone session, during which they finalize their ideas, and present them to a panel of experts, from whom they receive feedback
- “Graduating” participants receive a certificate and a windbreaker
Capstone projects deliver value to students and families
Beyond the increased knowledge that participating staff now have to share with prospective students and their families as a result of attending CAA, many of their capstone projects are already having an impact on campus. This component of the Academy resulted in high quality, usable ideas, including a video for incoming families explaining student debt that was so well-done, they reshot it (for improved video quality) and began using it at Financial Aid Night. There have also been additional movies created, one for prospective students, and one for online students.
What stands out about RMU’s initiative?
- The research and time that went into developing the curriculum and pedagogy made for high quality information and effective sessions, which kept participants engaged.
- The interactive nature of the sessions ensured that participants had an opportunity to absorb and apply their newfound knowledge, and were prepared to incorporate it into student interactions.
- The grassroots recruiting that the VP of Enrollment Management did for the Academy made for diverse representation—staff interfacing with students at various touchpoints throughout the recruitment and enrollment process.
- The targeting of front line staff for participation allowed for the efficiency of leveraging existing interactions with students to share key information with them about debt management, financing their education, and what to do in college to be successful.
- Along with valuable, objective financial guidance, these newly robust interactions with prospective families allow RMU to highlight their competitive tuition rate and high placement rate, relative to peers.
- The Academy presented a valuable professional development opportunity for staff—not only by virtue of the information they learned, but the chance to develop and present their capstone projects.
Lessons learned: what to take away from this case study
One of the reasons this program is so innovative is because it takes interactions the institution is already having with prospective students and parents, and makes them more informative and educational. It is extremely cost-effective, while also reaching students and families at times when they are particularly engaged.
The CAA, to an extent, follows the “flipped classroom” model. Participants read and watch information before attending each session, and after reviewing some key points, spend their time together putting that new knowledge into practice.
Participating in the CAA is an extremely valuable opportunity for institutional staff, whatever their role. Participants not only gain a wealth of knowledge about key financial topics, but also have a chance to practice presentation and collaboration skills through their capstone experience.
The capstone gives participants the opportunity to apply their newfound knowledge immediately, and, at RMU, resulted in tangible resources that have already been put into use at the institution.
Questions to consider as you create your own college affordability initiative
Use the following questions to begin conversations on your campus—with your colleagues, staff, and other stakeholders—around innovation. Keep in mind this is just an initial list of considerations—a place to start a discussion before diving deeper into the specific issues, challenges, and particularities of your unique situation, and institutional goals.
- Who on campus is best suited to spearhead this initiative, and what resources will they need to do so?
- What is the best channel for delivery—in-person or online? Or a hybrid?
- How will we go about recruiting participants? Who are we most interested in reaching?
- What are the information gaps we observe in our students and families that are most crucial to address?
- What institutional strengths (around cost, financial aid, learning opportunities) might we highlight in the recruitment and enrollment process?
- Who is best poised to lead these efforts, and who would we ideally want to contribute time and/or expertise?
- What expertise already exists on campus that we can draw from in developing the content for our modules?
- How do we balance making the modules interesting for those who already have expertise in the area, while not failing to provide the basics for those who don’t?
- Is there enough demand to offer this opportunity annually?
- How can we continue to share this information on an ongoing basis, especially with those who may not be inclined to participate in the Academy?
- How can we be sure this information is reaching students, and assess the impact it is having?
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