Washington—Rick Bischoff used to work in “enrollment heaven,” he told a session at the College Board Forum here on Thursday. And when he explained the conversations his previous institution, the California Institute of Technology, used to have about its financial-aid budget, the audience understood what he meant.
At Caltech, which is need-blind in admissions and meets students’ full need, the big concern was whether the endowment could continue to finance the entire financial-aid budget in the future, said Mr. Bischoff, the institution’s former director of undergraduate admissions. To ease its dependence on the endowment, Caltech doubled the maximum loan that could be included in a student’s financial-aid package, to $3,200.
But then, last November, Mr. Bischoff became vice president for enrollment management at Case Western Reserve University, and found himself in a different financial world. Case Western is need-blind in admissions but, like many colleges, cannot meet all of its students’ full need. Most of the university’s students receive some aid, and a good portion of its tuition revenue is used to finance the aid budget.
Case Western has a history of serving low-income and middle-income families, Mr. Bischoff said. But that mission is not so easy to fulfill under those pressures.
Mr. Bischoff shared some of the questions he is grappling with at Case Western. Would it be better to become need-sensitive, enrolling fewer needy students but meeting their full need?
“The easy solution to this problem is to enroll more students who can pay the full cost of attendance,” Mr. Bischoff said, though, he added, that is easier said than done.
Case Western is working to become more national and international in its reach, which can help in finding more of those full-pay students. Becoming more selective would also help the bottom line, as there is a correlation between the well-prepared and the well-off.
One strategy Mr. Bischoff said he is not considering is scrapping the university’s merit aid. “I don’t think that merit programs are unethical,” he said. “At all.”
Instead, Mr. Bischoff said, merit aid is what makes a place like Case Western possible for an upper-middle-income family.
None of those options are ideal, Mr. Bischoff said. “This is a problem where there are trade-offs.”
