In virtually every facet of our professional lives, teamwork is seen as a necessary ingredient for success. Business and industry place a high value on recruiting new employees with solid team-building/participating experience. The military prides itself on fostering team spirit. And certainly, professional sports have proven that spending money without teamwork is not sufficient.
Likewise, in today's climate, colleges and universities can't effectively compete without the Admissions and Financial Aid offices functioning as a team. Yet, there are often barriers to getting there, namely: old habits; different, unclear, or even conflicting goals and reward structures; and constrained resources.
Here are 10 principles for a healthy Admissions/Financial Aid partnership:
Timely aid awards are
"priceless," and the bestlaid
admissions strategies
won't produce optimal
results without them.
1. There are no second-class citizens.
Mutual respect must exist between the offices. In this regard, reporting lines are less important than shared goals. As enrollment management consultants, we are often asked, "What's the right organizational structure?" We don't believe any one model is universally superior. Effective partnerships can work even when Admissions and Financial Aid report to two different senior officers. For example, if Financial Aid reports to the chief financial officer and Admissions reports to the chief academic officer, the trust and respect just has to be stronger and the communication more formal.
In contrast, hard feelings often exist between Admissions and Financial Aid when the offices are brought together under an enrollment management model in form but not substance, where one office merely has operational oversight of the other. The key is the relationship between the leaders in each office and how they model behavior for their staffs and set expectations. If they respect each other and regularly get their staffs together to share goals and schedules, and to just get to know one another, any organizational structure can work.
2. Goal setting is a shared process.
Too often, Admissions views its goal as the number of new students (or the quality, or the diversity, or the equity of students), while Financial Aid sees its goal as simply staying within the budget. Why? Those offices are merely responding to the penalty-and-reward system that has been put in place. That is, if Admissions is only asked, "What are the numbers?", and Financial Aid is only asked, "Did you stick to the budget?", the attention is placed accordingly.
Admissions and Financial Aid should be held jointly accountable for the success or failure of reaching enrollment goals and, in particular, the common denominator of net tuition revenue. Beyond that, it is important for the goals to be well understood throughout the organization, not just among the leadership.
3. All grants and scholarships are green.
When Financial Aid staff members don't know or appear to care about the value and criteria of merit programs and the Admissions office yields to Financial Aid on all questions regarding need-based aid because they don't know how it works, it is very likely that net tuition revenue is not being maximized.
It's fine if the Admissions staff is responsible for merit award decisions and the Financial Aid staff awards need-based funds, but collaboration and coordination are key. It's also fine if the Financial Aid staff awards all institutional aid. But strategies need to be based on shared goals and grounded in data.
At the same time, awards given for different purposes (merit vs. need vs. performance) need recognition of how the whole package comes together. The family's enrollment decision will be based on net costs after all grants and scholarships have been deducted. Having several funding centers (e.g., coaches, academic departments, Admissions, Financial Aid) without coordination or collective understanding of how these monies are coming together in an individual package almost guarantees bad things will happen. Too much aid will fail to attractive candidates who may already have a high probability of enrollment.
4. Admissions and Financial Aid data files must be merged for effective research.
