Financial aid often opens the door for many families who want to send their children to your school. However, managing the financial aid process can be one of the biggest headaches for your school leaders.
Paperwork, stress, and trying to match available funds to demonstrated need are just some of the complexities that comprise the typical financial aid decision-making process. However, a proactive, organized approach to financial aid can make everything run much more smoothly.
Consider the following suggestions as you review your financial aid procedures for the next school year.
Choose your financial aid committee carefully. Your committee should be four or five members and not include parents of students or Board members. Since financial aid ultimately falls to the Business Office, it should include business officer leaders. You as School Head should also serve on this committee.
Review your financial aid mission statement. Your financial aid committee must define its mission, answering the question, "Why do we offer financial aid?" Financial aid is not a giveaway. It serves the school and its larger mission, and your committee members must clearly define that link. Your financial aid mission should tie into the school’s larger mission and how the committee supports it.
Review or create procedures. How will you best understand a family's ability to pay? Will your team manually calculate aid for each family, or will you use a system that allows you to customize your award recommendations to reflect your defined policies? Whatever you decide, it's important to understand how the calculations work and how they reflect your mission.
Establish priorities. If there isn't enough money available to cover all applications, consider how you will prioritize requests. Should returning students get higher consideration, or will you look to support families who only require a small amount of aid? You can also allocate additional resources where needed in order to encourage enrollment, if that’s a priority for your team.
Set protocols and deadlines. When will you process applications? Will you review each one as it comes in, or will you batch the applications and do an entire subset at one specific time (for example, making returning parents' deadline one month earlier than new parents)? Another option is to review all applications at once so that you can consider the full range of needs.
Allocating financial aid appropriately is an extremely important aspect of your school’s budget. Consider these suggestions to support your Business Office in striking the delicate balance between offering mission-appropriate families the right amount of aid while also preserving your school’s bottom line.
Additional ISM Resources:
ISM White Paper 5 Elements to Consider When Setting Your Financial Aid Policy
The Source for School Heads Vol. 16 No. 5 How to Announce a New Strategic Financial Plan
Additional Resources for ISM Members:
I&P Vol. 36 No. 1 Mid-Year Financial Reports and Your Strategic Financial Plan
I&P Vol. 36 No. 3 Your Strategic Financial Plan: Expenditure Control for the Long Run
