A shuffle. That is what Saint Louis University students will find when they open their Fall 2011 financial aid package. The University’s $2,000 housing scholarship will be moved to merit-based assistance, effective in the fall.
“We are doing this change because we believe that upperclassmen need to have greater flexibility in determining where they can live,” vice president for Student Development Kent Porterfield said. “We think this is a win win because students retain their aid, they get greater choice in where they can live and we still believe we are going to have strong demand for housing.”
Porterfield also expressed that students will still receive the same scholarship assistance, but they will not have to live on campus to receive their full award. Cari Wickliff, Director of Student Financial Services, also stressed that this decision will not reduce any student award package.
“We really haven’t found a situation where it would negatively affect a student because it really is just taking something that was divided and putting it into one where every student is going to have tuition, but not every student is going to have a housing charge,” Wickliff said.
This change will increase the overall discount rate at the University as students who lived off campus who had to forfeit their scholarship money in the past will be given the full award regardless of where they live.
The University will thus be awarding more scholarship money to all of its students and according to Wickliff the University has already budgeted to compensate this.
“This will increase the overall discount rate at the institution, but that is something that has been discussed and has been supported that this is the right thing to do and the right time to do it,” Wickliff said. “We just have a lot of work to do behind the scenes so that when you receive your award letter you don’t have to come in and ask us questions about it.”
This decision comes in the wake of the residency requirement for freshman and sophomores that was first announced in spring of 2008.
This fall was the first semester in which two entire classes were required to live on campus because of this requirement. This requirement along with the housing scholarship and strong demand for student housing created this need for administrative change to keep pace with the growing on-campus housing demand according to Porterfield.
“Since last spring, we have been looking at the student housing issue regarding the scholarship, we had a lot of conversations about if this was the right time to make a change,” Porterfield said. “Student Government Association was pretty clear last year and SGA has been pretty clear this year that they believe that the thing for us to do is to make a change in policy.”
Last summer, the University announced to incoming students and their families that the housing scholarship was not being offered anymore, as the administrators felt that it did not seem necessary with the residency requirement.
“We didn’t want to take those dollars out of their aid packages so we moved them,” Porterfield said. “We are now going to be doing the same thing for our continuing students.”
Another ramification of this scholarship move will include students wanting to live in the Flats at 374, SLU’s newest housing option, not having to sacrifice any type of aid.
This year students were not given their $2,000 housing scholarship when living there but instead a $2,000 SLU rebate of sorts. The owners of the Flats gave $1,000 to students and this was matched by SLU for a total of $2,000.
This was in response to the number of upperclassmen students who had no other SLU housing choice but the Flats. The Flats will remain a housing option for junior and senior students for a second year. Movement of the scholarship is already changing student-housing plans for next year.
“Now that I know my housing scholarship is moving to an academic scholarship, I am definitely moving off campus,” sophomore Terrence Murphy said. “It is cheaper [off-campus] and I don’t have to deal with Housing and Res Life.”
