Iowa's private colleges are seeing increased interest after announcing changes to tuition and financial aid programs, but FAFSA issues have mitigated some of their success. (Photo illustration by Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)
Some of Iowa’s private colleges announced changes to their tuition and financial aid offerings last fall, hoping to showcase their affordability for students who might not look twice at them due to their sticker price. These efforts have had mixed results, impacted by problems with the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
At Graceland University in Lamoni, leaders say the changes made to tuition and financial aid simplification efforts generated more interest in the university, but the FAFSA problems had a chilling effect on enrollment.
The college announced last September that its tuition would be cut nearly in half, from $32,500 to $19,950, and its financial aid model would shift from offering scholarships in a variety of areas to providing one single award to each student, factoring in academics, financial aid and more.
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Then-University President Patricia Draves said at the time that these changes would stop families from passing on Graceland due to its sticker price and students from having to worry about qualifying for multiple scholarships. Last year’s incoming class was the largest the college had seen since 2015 at 341 students, but Vice President for Enrollment and Strategic Growth Deb Skinner said this year the university is hoping to land at 300 for this fall semester, 50 short of its usual goal.
Skinner said the delay in the FAFSA’s release and the issues seen by both applicants and universities slowed down the college’s recruitment cycle by about three months. The college decided to keep recruiting and offering scholarships up until classes began Aug. 26. Despite the problems, she said she believes the changes were well received and did their job of keeping Graceland in the running for prospective students.
“Our students are just hanging there in the balance, and we’re trying to accommodate them the best we can,” Skinner said. “But many families who rely upon the Pell Grant and SEOG (Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant) funds are not going to commit to a college if they don’t know what those final out-of-pocket costs are going to be, and I do not blame them. So, we’ve had to adjust our goals because of the impact of the FAFSA delay.”
There isn’t any metric to track how much interest in Graceland has changed from last fall, Skinner said, but once the university has final enrollment numbers for this semester, she’ll be interested in seeing about any demographic changes among new students.
Conversations with coaches and counselors, however, have indicated that more prospective students were looking at Graceland for the fall, Interim President Joel Shrock said.
It is hard to ascertain the true effect of the changes, especially since they haven’t yet received final enrollment data for the fall semester, but Shrock said he believes they had a positive impact on the university overall.
“Trying to figure out the exact impact is difficult,” Shrock said. “It’s not as simple as it looks like, but based on the discussion that our counselors are having, that our coaches are having, that move has generated interest from potential students.”
Simpson College in Indianola, however, is seeing the largest class in more than a decade this fall. The college announced two new financial aid offerings last year — the 100K Promise, which provides full-tuition scholarships to students whose family’s adjusted household income is $100,000 or less, and the 99 county Full-Tuition scholarship, which provides one student from each county a full-tuition scholarship based on academic merit and financial need.
President Jay Byers said both initiatives have done their job in attracting new students and making it more transparent that a Simpson education isn’t out of reach.
“What we’ve been hearing from students and their parents is that these are initiatives that are making the ability to come to a place like Simpson a lot more both accessible and affordable,” Byers said.
Vice President for Enrollment Leigh Mlodzik said the university received nearly 2,500 applications for fall enrollment, a 22% increase from last year, and admitted almost 1,800, a 20% increase.
The 100K Promise scholarship wasn’t affected by the FAFSA delays because families didn’t have to wait for those results to know whether they’d qualify, Leigh said. The 99-County Full Tuition scholarship, however, was harder to administer because deadlines had to be pushed back.
“Even though our numbers are up overall, I do think that the FAFSA delay did have a negative impact overall on us as well,” Mlodzik said.
Wartburg College in Waverly is expecting about 450 new students to attend classes this fall, Vice President for Strategic Student Recruitment Rick Willis said in an email, which is slightly higher than the average from the past three years.
The Wartburg Commitment, announced last September, lowered the private college’s tuition by more than 45% to $25,000, according to a news release , and lowered fees. This brought the sticker price closer to what students usually pay to attend the university after scholarships and other financial aid are applied.
Iowa Tuition Grant recipients also have their cost of tuition covered completely through university, state and federal assistance through the commitment, and out-of-state students who show comparable need receive at least $9,500 per year to help pay tuition.
Willis said in the email that the college has seen a positive response to these changes from students and families.
“We are excited about the incoming class and believe the principles of access and affordability promoted by the Wartburg Commitment have enabled us to attract another strong class despite the significant challenges presented by the FAFSA delays during this year,” Willis said in an emailed statement.
As more students become aware of student loan debt and limit their college searches by sticker price, Skinner said many private colleges could be left out of conversations in the future if they don’t show outright their cost of attendance, no matter how much financial aid can bring tuition down.
Skinner said she sees Graceland as a leader in the trend of adjusting tuition and financial aid packages to provide students with a more transparent view of what they’ll pay, and that private colleges will need to “assess how their sticker price impacts the psychology of the decision-making process” in the future if they want to compete with other universities as enrollment numbers shrink.
Mlodzik agreed, and said Simpson College made it a focus to see how best to provide their education to as many students as possible.
“When you look at both Iowa and nationally, it’s a really competitive market right now and schools have to rethink the ways that they’ve always done things and think about being innovative,” Mlodzik said. “A big piece of that is looking at affordability for students specifically, and that’s one of the things that we’ve taken a hard look at in terms of affordability and access and how that fits into our mission.”
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