Strategic Allocation of Endowed Scholarships

Maintaining net tuition revenue is becoming increasingly challenging for many institutions as demographics decline and price sensitivity increases. Financial aid leveraging has buttressed enrollments for many institutions, but leadership teams and boards are becoming leery of further increases in aid budgets as discount rates approach 40%, 50%, or even 60%.

In an environment where every potential dollar of aid is precious, many institutions leave millions of dollars of endowed scholarship funds on the table ever year. Even when a fund is allocated, a lack of true accountability and inefficient workflow management processes mean that allocation decisions are often made in the summer or fall, missing a crucial opportunity to inflect student recruitment or retention decisions in the spring.

This white paper describes how best practice institutions have increased the share of endowed funds allocated every year and pulled allocations into the critical spring packaging period. Download the white paper or explore each section below.

Creating an accountability infrastructure

Although central management of scholarships almost always improves efficiency, it leads to a reduction in authority for academic units and, occasionally, the development office. All central scholarship functions must have a complete database of endowed funds, but the value of centralizing other functions depends on an institution’s organizational structure and the degree of opposition to central control.

Centralize Your Scholarship Function

Maximizing the number of potential awards

Many institutions lack central application and fund databases. Some institutions have not consolidated all student eligibility information from applications into a single place; others may not know the sum total of all endowed funds or how often they are allocated. This makes effective allocation (if allocation is centralized) or oversight (if departments allocate) impossible.

Reducing restrictions is a key investment in allocation efficiency. The number of difficult-to-satisfy restrictions on endowed funds can predetermine when and how many awards will be made. Highly restrictive funds may be impossible to award and demand more staff time to find eligible students.

Practices to Increase Awards

Streamlining the award and stewardship process

Staff invest considerable time in matching eligible students to scholarships, but these tasks can be automated with a modicum of investment. Scholarship management systems (SMS) are valuable, but simply automating database queries in existing enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) can achieve similar results.

EM and development staff also spend too much time pursuing students for personal essays, thank-you notes, etc. Gathering stewardship-relevant information during the admissions process or linking scholarship disbursements to stewardship tasks increases student compliance without additional staff time.

Practices to Streamline Processes

Download the Report