College Roundatble #4

This month's Roundtable question is posed to Matt Spooner, admissions officer at American Jewish University:

How has the economy affected admissions decisions, enrollment decisions, and financial aid determinations at your school? More specifically, has your school admitted more students or fewer, have you seen enrollment increase or decrease, and have you given more or less financial aid since the downturn?

While the economy hasn’t impacted the way AJU’s Admissions Team arrives at admissions decisions, we have noticed a significant climb in the number inquiries about scholarships and financial aid from prospective students and their families. This trend, coupled with our sensitivity toward the financial strain that so many of us are facing, has resulted in us giving more financial aid in recent years. In fact, AJU was recently recognized as one of the top 13 colleges and universities on The Princeton Review’s “Financial Aid Rating Honor Roll,” a first for our university and a sign that we’re working our way through some very difficult financial straits.

As a private institution with a solid financial grounding, AJU has been able to weather the downturn quite well. On average, we’ve admitted and enrolled more students over the past few months than we have during the past few years. Much of this can be attributed to our ability to be generous with scholarships and financial aid, a “must have” even for a low-tuition high-discount university like AJU.