The leaders of Colorado Mesa University proposed a financial gamble at the beginning of the year.
They’d gathered for a January board meeting to discuss how the Grand Junction university, which largely serves lower-income students, would respond to the botched rollout of a new federal financial aid form that was keeping prospective enrollees from knowing how much money they’d receive from the U.S. government to help pay for school.
How long would many of the 10,000 students that CMU usually serves wait for their financial aid package before deciding college wasn’t for them? President John Marshall didn’t want to find out.
Someone at the board meeting floated an idea: What if the university calculated how much financial aid it believed each student would qualify for to help them make informed college decisions? If CMU calculated wrong, the school would own its promise when the federal dollars eventually came through and cover the difference between its calculation and what the federal government ultimately paid out.
Colorado Mesa University President John Marshall stands for a portrait in his office on the Grand Junction campus on Friday, July 26, 2024. (Special to The Denver Post, William Woody)
“There was this long, pregnant pause around the table and you could kind of see, with almost no debate, all these faces nodding,” Marshall said.
Marshall and the school’s chief financial officer executed back-of-the-napkin math to estimate by how much they could afford to be wrong. If they were off by 20%, CMU would lose about $2 million, they figured. A more realistic estimate — off by about 5% — meant the school would lose around $500,000.
But by doing nothing, Marshall said, the university risked losing a whole cohort of students who decided to forego college for fear they couldn’t afford it.
Marshall and CMU’s leadership rolled the dice, knowing they likely would lose money. Now, the university is reaping the benefits of that risk.
Their calculations were off by $283,620 — lower than anticipated, Marshall said. But in turn, CMU’s new student enrollment this fall is up by 31%, the largest freshman class on record for the university.
Marshall called the initiative — dubbed “The Wait is Over” — an objective success.
“Somebody out there is going to have a different life because we were able to do something to convince them to come to school,” said Lindsey Campbell, CMU’s executive director of financial aid. “It’s just cool.”
“The Wait is Over”
The math Marshall and his colleagues worked out during the January board meeting was based on how many students in years past qualified for Pell grants — federal money awarded by financial need that recipients don’t have to pay back.
Using that data, they guessed how many students would qualify for Pell grants this fall and estimated how much that would cost.
For the real calculations, the ones presented to prospective students as their promised financial aid package, Marshall needed more precision — and to get CMU’s financial aid department on board.
When Marshall first pitched the “Wait is Over” campaign to Campbell, he remembers her eyes growing wide as saucers.
“I told her that I know this is going to sound crazy, but stick with me for a minute,” Marshall said.
Campbell’s initial shock softened into brainstorming whether the idea was even feasible for her 11-person department to pull off when they already were stretched thin dealing with the federal financial aid crisis.
The U.S. Department of Education introduced a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in late 2023 in a bid to make it easier to use and to provide more money to needy college students. Students fill out FAFSA to find out how much money they could receive from the federal government to go to college based on income.
But the rollout of the new online form was plagued with delays, errors and widespread confusion last fall and earlier this year, leaving students and higher education experts worried about a lack of participation in a program that can make the cost of college feasible for marginalized students.
Campbell had a thought that could make the board’s big idea work.
A student walks her dog near the campus of Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction on Friday, July 26, 2024. (Special to The Denver Post, William Woody)
CMU recently partnered with a new net-price calculator company. Most universities have tools on their websites in which aspiring students can fill out their financial information to receive cost-of-attendance estimates. The estimated cost for a full year of school for a Colorado resident living on campus this upcoming year is about $26,800, including housing, food, tuition and other costs.
With the help of the company that built the existing tool for CMU, Campbell helped create a more accurate version that would send students’ information straight to the financial aid department.
A few weeks later, “The Wait is Over” launched on Valentine’s Day.
“The initial white-knuckle panic turned out not to be true,” Marshall said.
CMU issued nearly 4,000 early financial aid offers long before the federal government, stymied by the malfunctioning form, sent out its aid packages.
About 1,000 of those offers were sent to prospective new students. Of those, 900 registered for the fall semester, Campbell said.
As of last week, CMU was set to welcome 2,293 new students to campus this fall. Nearly half of those students enrolled directly after receiving their early financial aid offer.
The 31% enrollment bump in one year was a shock, administrators said. The goal is usually to increase annual enrollment by 1%, said Kelsey Dudley, CMU public relations specialist.
The numbers also indicate the campaign helped with student retention. More than 81% of continuing students at CMU enrolled after getting their early aid offer.
Putting CMU on the map
While Kimberly Medina, CMU’s assistant vice president for enrollment management, was sure the “Wait is Over” initiative contributed to the enrollment increase, she said the university didn’t just send out a couple of marketing emails about it and call it good.
The financial aid department held frequent workshops at high schools across the state to promote the initiative and the school’s scholarship promising tuition coverage to qualifying families who earn $65,000 or less. Marshall visited schools with lower-income student populations to promote the initiative.
The most important thing Marshall thinks “The Wait is Over” did was put CMU on the map for families with potential first-generation college students.
“I would visit these high schools and hear from kid after kid that they couldn’t get FAFSA to work, and I would tell them, ‘We’ll figure out what your financial aid is going to be right now,’ ” Marshall said. “It made a difference.”
Olathe High School Principal Scot Brown said he appreciated Marshall making the pitch for higher education to his Western Slope students.
“A lot of our kids’ families don’t see a way they’ll be able to make college work financially,” Brown said. “This opens up doors and provides them an opportunity.”
After Marshall explained that CMU would guarantee an early financial aid package and had available scholarship opportunities, Brown said his students — predominantly Hispanic with lower socioeconomic backgrounds — lined up to ask Marshall questions about the possibility of college.
“A lot of our students have never been out of the valley,” Brown said. “You have to raise the awareness that college is possible for them, and I appreciate CMU showing students the possibilities.”
Marshall also traveled to Aurora West College Preparatory School, a metro Denver school with a large immigrant student population, to spread the word there.
“You could see among some of our juniors, it realigned the idea to them that college was within their reach,” said Ryan Adams, the school’s principal.
Aurora West this year had among the highest FAFSA completion rates in Colorado, with almost half of the school’s applicable students filling out their forms. Adams attributes that to Marshall’s visit.
Students make their way between classes at Colorado Mesa University on September 24, 2019 in Grand Junction, Colorado. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Courage and calculations
CMU’s own FAFSA completion likely was boosted by the initiative, too.
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During a year when institutions across the state and nation saw FAFSA completion plummet amid turmoil over the updated form’s rollout, CMU only saw an overall 0.5% decline compared to last year and a 0.5% increase in FAFSA submissions among new students, according to university data.
Comparatively, the country has seen a 10.9% decrease in FAFSA completion this year compared to last, according to the most recent data from the National College Attainment Network. Colorado has seen a 9.9% decline in FAFSA completion, the data showed.
CMU leaders received inquiries from other universities asking how they were putting out aid offers before the federal government, Marshall said.
The money the university ended up owing from its miscalculation was worth it, Marshall said.
“Hundreds of kids are going to college that maybe wouldn’t have gone anywhere otherwise,” Marshall said.
CMU’s freshman class is so full that some students will be starting out the year living in hotels rather than dorm rooms, Marshall said.
“I would argue this initiative is not the kind of thing you do unless there’s a really deep sense of common purpose across the institution at all levels,” Marshall said. “Everyone was on board and made it happen in a few weeks. That’s courage.”
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