Helping Low-Income Students Navigate Higher Ed

This episode of FYI follows the journey of a financial aid leader, Samantha Hicks, and how her life experiences impact how she supports low-income students through her work.

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Who is Samantha Hicks?

Samantha Hicks if the Assistant Vice President of Financial Aid and Scholarships at Coastal Carolina University. She grew up as a financially disadvantaged student herself and uses that experience to guide how she helps students today.

In this Episode

Samantha Hicks, Assistant Vice President of Financial Aid and Scholarships at Coastal Carolina University, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the complexities of the most recent enrollment cycle, and the challenges this year of the FAFSA delay compounding on students who already dealt with COVID challenges.

Samantha brings into focus yet another vector of challenges that low-income students also have face as they enter Higher Ed. Samantha shares her personal journey from poverty to her current position, offers insights into the unique challenges faced by financially disadvantaged students, and reflects on how COVID-19 and FAFSA changes have impacted their approach both on the student facing side and also on the internal support end of things.

They also explore using strategic planning, communication, and mentorship to better support students moving forward and the value of sometimes just acknowledging that it’s been a tough summer.

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Episode Transcript

Helping Low-Income Students Navigate Higher Ed with Samantha Hicks

Publishing Date: August 27, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, I sit down with the Assistant Vice President of Financial Aid and Scholarships for Coastal Carolina University, Samantha Hicks. We reflect on the most recent enrollment cycle and look ahead with a lens, specifically, on supporting students who are coming from low-income families and going through the financial aid process. Let’s listen in.

Hello, Samantha!

[00:00:35] Samantha: Hey, how are you?

[00:00:36] Gil: I’m lovely. How are you?

[00:00:38] Samantha: I’m good. I’m good.

[00:00:40] Gil: Great. Well, thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:42] Samantha: Oh, you’re welcome.

[00:00:44] Gil: Is it calming down for you, or are you still in hyper crazy mode?

[00:00:48] Samantha: We’re still in hyper crazy mode. We will be until, at least, move-in first day of classes.

[00:00:55] Gil: And then you’re in hyper crazy mode for the next one.

[00:00:58] Samantha: Yeah. Then we start… it’s crazy, like, it is so strange to me living in financial aid, but thinking about admissions, gearing up to launch a new application year, and having to think through 25, 26. I can’t even say it. It’s crazy.

[00:01:15] Gil: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard because I feel like that’s the constant battle in higher ed, right? Where it’s… when you get to this time of year, it used to be May. Now, we try to move everything earlier and then the FAFSA decides to make everything move later and/or COVID or whatever, the influencer is.

Maybe, there are forces at play saying we don’t need to start moving deadlines earlier, we need to start making things change. But it’s hard working in the world of helping institutions with their strategy because there’s always that fire in front of them of the day, but if we could spend a little more time looking ahead and putting together a stronger plan or evaluating outcomes a little more closely, maybe we’re not going through these crazy cycles. But no amount of strategic planning a year ago could have solved for the issues we face this year, right?

[00:02:02] Samantha: Oh, no. It’s wild. It’s been a wild ride.

[00:02:05] Gil: Yeah. So, tell me about yourself. Where are you from, originally? How’d you get to where you are? What keeps you up at night? What motivates you?

[00:02:13] Samantha: Yeah. So, I was not born in South Carolina, but I was raised here. I moved here when I was nine, to the town that Coastal is in called Conway. So, most people know Myrtle Beach, but we’re actually in Conway. And so, I grew up here, was a local girl.

My background, I come from, like, really, very much a poverty background. So, I joke with students a lot of times and tell them, like, when I say we were dirt poor, we were, like, I could see dirt through the floor, poor. So, like, I didn’t have central heating, central air growing up. So, we were very much low-income. I did have two parents in the household, but going to college was like, “Yeah, you’re not doing that.” But I wanted to be a teacher, you know. I really wanted to be a teacher. And so, the one thing I was good at was school. And so, I did well. I got scholarships. At the time, my high school did a half tuition scholarship to Coastal Carolina University. Between that, the Pell Grant, and then we have a state scholarship. I had, basically, a full ride to go to Coastal.

[00:03:19] Gil: Awesome.

[00:03:20] Samantha: So, I came to Coastal, got my degree in elementary education. My sophomore year… junior year, I guess. Junior year, that summer, I took a job in the financial aid office. That was crazy, working a summer in financial aid. Worked there a couple summers. And then I graduated with my degree in elementary ed. Taught first grade for a little bit, quickly said, “Yeah, I don’t want to do this.” And so, then, I got offered a counseling job at Coastal in 2010, and I have been here ever since.

[00:03:57] Gil: As they say, the rest is history.

[00:03:59] Samantha: The rest is history.

[00:04:02] Gil: So, coming from your background, it seems like you’re in a unique position to have a lot of empathy for students who are going through the process and might have financial issues. It’s a very unique perspective that many folks in your position might not have. And I know that, a lot of times, again, I worked at a couple of regional private schools in the Northeast, and I have colleagues that work in financial aid. And everyone in the space is focused on supporting student success. Obviously, I’ve spoken to a lot of financial-aid-related folks this cycle for the podcast, specifically, but, you know, I feel like you have an even more deeper lens that you might be able to refer back to. So, how do you balance that and leverage your personal experience when you’re working with students?

[00:04:48] Samantha: Yeah. So, it’s very… I talk about this a lot. Nobody talks to you about survivor’s guilt of coming out of poverty. And so, being the one that got out and the one that’s, you know, able to have a good income now because I have a degree and being able to have a different lifestyle than what I had growing up, that’s a lot of stress on a student, as they’re going through the college experience, that not every student has.

And so, that’s something that I carried that I don’t think I realized I carried during that time. But I talk now to a lot of students. I just had a student recently who was, kind of, sharing the same thing. He said, “You know, I can’t go home and tell my family about mental health struggles that I’m having while I’m at college because they just can’t relate to me anymore.” And I don’t think enough people that have come out of poverty are talking about that, but it’s interesting to be in, in the decision-making processes. So, as we think about, like, what scholarships are we given? Are we given merit-based scholarships? Are we given need-based scholarships? I’m in these rooms where there are other folks with great intentions talking about low-income students, and it’s almost surreal to stop and think I am what they’re talking about. I was a low-income student.

And so, I think I can give that perspective. But yes, seeing, especially in my work in financial aid, seeing the ways that low-income identities, kind of, come up in our space… and I’ll give you an example. When we talk about, in financial aid, verification, that process, you fill out a FAFSA. And it used to be that one out of every three FAFSAs got selected to go through a verification process. And I would joke and say, “This is the government making poor people prove they’re poor,” because it seemed to really be a disadvantage for low-income students. I’m calling an 18-year-old saying, “Hey, I need your W-2 and taxes.” And I would hear of financial aid administrators getting frustrated because students would turn in the wrong documents.

And I’m like, “Wait a minute. If I’m a low-income student, I don’t file taxes. I don’t know what a W-2 is. My family may not know what that is.” So, having that perspective, I think, does sometimes help in the decision-making process, and then it helps, how do we make what is somewhat a hidden culture? If you’ve never been exposed to certain things you don’t know, there’s just things you don’t know that you take for granted. And so, having someone that can say, “Hey, we need to explain this.” When we say, “You need a W-2,” provide an example of what a W-2 is, so they can look and say, “Oh, I have that.” Or, when you’re thinking about things like orientation, the cost of orientation is not just the cost of signing up and paying the university for the orientation experience. It’s missing work. It’s traveling. And you have to think through those things that not every student has the ability, or not every parent has the ability to do that.

[00:07:47] Gil: Yeah, I’m looking around my desk because there’s a couple of books that I’ve read over the years. Back in the day, NACAC would host a virtual book club on Twitter. And it was #NACACreads. So, we’ll put a link to Twitter #NACACreads in the episode notes, so people can, like, look back on the good old days of Twitter prior to the craziness.

But there, there are, there’s, there are many books about this topic, particularly, around lower-income first-generation students coming to college and then feeling lost, right? Because you, you’re, and a little bit of a guilt associated with that, where, you are, as you said, getting out of the poverty-based situation, but then when you return, it’s… I feel like the narrative is always, like, the risk of falling back into it, but it’s not even the risk of falling back. It’s the feeling as if you’ve left folks behind or feeling that you can’t help others because you’re still helping yourself, right?

And there are all these barriers that, for the students who make it past all those barriers or over those hurdles, it’s that return-back that is a big part of it. And the reality is, is that these students go through this cycle four or five times while they’re in college, right?

[00:09:00] Samantha: Oh, yeah.

[00:09:00] Gil: Because they’re going to school and then they’re going back. I know I mentioned prior to recording we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about, about the past. I want to look to the future. But this cycle, specifically, with the FAFSA, it’s supposed to make it easier for students in these situations to qualify for aid, which made it easier to qualify, but didn’t make it easier to get it, right? Because you’re waiting for these systems to be upgraded and in place, and then there’s errors and those sorts of things.

So, again, in your position, this cycle, specifically, and we had Amanda Craddock on a number of weeks ago, and she just spoke about the outcomes at Coastal and the work that you’ve all done. This is becoming like a little mini-Coastal Carolina mini-series on FYI.

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[00:10:33] Gil: I’d love for you to talk a little bit about some of the things that you’ve done and recommendations you have for folks with helping students this past. What did you learn? What did you… what went well? What could be improved upon? And then, we’ll start looking ahead to next cycle.

[00:10:49] Samantha: Yeah. So, this was an interesting cycle. We had two things that, I think, are at play here. One, our admissions folks moved to a deadline model, which we had not had. We were always rolling admissions for as long as I was at Coastal. But we moved to the early decision, early action, regular decision model. So, we had planned to transform our financial aid process to match that decision model. And then we found out we were not getting financial aid information.

So, we talked about a number of things, you know. Do we do estimated financial aid packages even without FAFSA data? Do we have the students submit something to us? I heard where schools were doing that, have them submit something, and then will give a financial aid package. We decided that did not best fit our population of students.

And so, one good thing is that we do have merit scholarships that are not need-based at all. So, the students were still able to get information on their merit awards. We put that in our acceptance letter. So, they knew what the institution was committing from the merit side early on in the cycle, which I think is good.

Then, we used or tried to use our net price calculator to say, “Hey, we don’t have financial aid packages.” We communicated this out to students and families. And we said, “But here’s a tool that you can use to get a ballpark estimate.” It is just an estimate. That was, kind of, the big push. And I say that, because anytime you tell families this is what you can get and then you don’t give that to them, there are questions there.

But that’s one area that I think we probably could utilize the net price calculator a little bit more and a little bit better. Make sure it more closely aligns with what our actual financial aid package does. It was okay. It just, I think, it could have gone a little bit better. I did a virtual… we called it Dining with Dr. Hicks, so our admissions office set that up where I grabbed some food from on campus and sent out invitations to our new students and said, “Hey, I’m going to be in my office sitting, eating on camera. Come, ask me your financial aid questions.” And so, that was very successful. We recorded it. So, students and families could play it back and get that information. So, I think that helped, kind of, on the new student side.

We did a lot of education on campus. We created a website for our new and continuing students that, kind of, talked about what the changes were, what our plans were, when. You know, we listed out dates. And they changed, obviously, because of everything that happened. But we had a landing spot where, you know, if a student called our admissions folks and they wanted to know, when is financial aid being packaged, the admissions folks could say, “Hey, here’s this website. Go look at it. It’s got all the information you want on it.”

And then, once we were able to package new students, we did. And that was a little bit interesting, because at that time, schools were still trying to figure out. We know we have some FAFSA records that we’ve got in that are fine, and we know we have some that are terrible. And what decision do you hold off on everybody? Do you try to comb through? And so, we decided, and our administration decided the best thing to do was get the financial aid decisions out to those that we could, but we put a, kind of, caveat that, “Hey, there may be issues that we find out we have to change our financial aid package.”

And those were few. We did have a couple, but we got that. We tried to get that information out as soon as possible, because I think that is what’s really important. Historically, we get financial aid packages out in, like, December. And so, for them to go out in April, almost May, was really late for us. But even more so, when you’re a student trying to make decisions.

We did push our enrollment deadline back from May 1st to May 15th. Many schools pushed back to June 1st. So, we massaged it a little bit to help the students that needed the help. But we got financial aid packages as soon as we can.

The big thing that we’re doing once we started with continuing students that I think is really beneficial is, the students, we still have students who we can’t give them financial aid packages. We can’t make corrections because of the stuff that’s going on with the government. But things like dependency overrides, our homeless students, those are some of those really vulnerable populations. And so, my team actually developed an estimated financial aid offer they’re doing by hand to say, “Your dependency override appeal is approved. We can’t technically package you financially, but here’s what it’s going to look like.” So, they have something they can take around campus or to wherever they need to say, “This is what my financial aid package is going to look like,” to make those decisions, because we’re in the time frame now, bills have gone out. They’re talking about payments. And so, trying to do whatever we can to help those students because there are still some that are having issues. And so, I’m trying to give them some tools to work through those.

[00:15:52] Gil: Yeah. And I think part of the, you know, the space has acknowledged that the FAFSA fiasco, #FAFSAfiasco. I don’t know why we keep doing things to send people to Twitter. Nobody’s on Twitter. So, the FAFSA fiasco, of course, like all of these things, most impacted the students of need, right, and the students who have the least going for them in this process. If you’re a family of means, you don’t necessarily need to wait on your financial aid package to make your decisions, right? And obviously, sadly, there are less and less families of means in this process. And there are more students that fit the profile of being impacted than not, right?

But the issue is that the students who have the background that you have are the population that are most impacted by these types of scenarios. Name the crazy thing in the cycle, and it’s impacting that group, right? Nothing… and so, I think, extending deadlines and doing those sorts of things is a great opportunity to give students what they need.

But the challenge for a lot of institutions is, we talked about this at the beginning, we have the need to start looking ahead and planning ahead. So, you got to start putting together things like budgets. We have to think about, and I hate to say it, but, like, things like net tuition revenue, right?

[00:17:07] Samantha: Right.

[00:17:07] Gil: Like, you get to a point where there are some that might look at it as well. We could package these students earlier. We could just use our napkin calculations to put it out and then take the risk on the institution, but we’re going to wait until we get the FAFSA data. That way, we are covered and we’re not making mistakes. At the end of the day, there are other ways we could maybe handle this situation in the future to better support those students. Now that we’ve gotten through this cycle, we start thinking, “Okay, what do we do next year, right?” There’s obviously changes happening with the Department of Education oversight of the FAFSA implementation. And we could have a whole separate conversation about the who and the how and the what’s going to impact that from a leadership perspective.

But for a school like Coastal, and for someone in your background who has a unique lens, what are some of the things that you all are talking about to get prepared, given there’s no guarantee that next cycle is going to be completely smooth, either? Again, hindsight is 2020. You’ve got the opportunity now to look back and say what worked, what didn’t work. What are some of the things that we might be able to be more proactive about to better support students, knowing that we can’t control what the government does with their forms?

[00:18:19] Samantha: Yeah. And so, we, I think, as automated and, you know, mass communications that we send out, that we are gotten so, kind of, large in that respect. There is a value to that personalized communication. And so, I think for me, one of the things that has come out of this is the need to really spell out the process. But also, what I have seen this cycle is, even more so, the need to have almost, like, a mentor to walk students and families through these processes from A to Z.

And so, when we think about our communication plan, that’s something that we’re talking about for the next cycle, is how do we build a, kind of, comprehensive communication plan from the beginning to the day they actually move into campus and all that and make sure they have all of the information they need, even if we don’t have FAFSA information? That starts with making sure that we’re doing some education on filling out the FAFSA. That was, kind of, a struggle this year, you know, what kind of fun FAFSA campaigns can we do there? How can we use our students to help do that education? Because I think, sometimes, peer-to-peer interaction is a little bit more effective.

And just making sure that we keep some of the good things. One of the things about COVID, it was terrible. It was really bad. But some good things came out of COVID. And so, as we go through this FAFSA mess, I think there will be some good things that do come out of it. And I think for us that personalized kind of communication we did, with every orientation session that came up, the students that were attending the orientation got a text message that said, “Hey, it’s financial aid.” They could reply. “Have you seen your aid package? Do you have questions? Are you good to go?” And so, that, if they had questions, and they, then, could start a text conversation with a financial aid counselor.

So, getting that communication, kind of, on the forefront, being more proactive with it rather than reactive, I think, is going to be really beneficial for us in the next cycle. So, I think that will be good for us.

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[00:21:24] Gil: With that said, I think that one of the things to really double down on is facilitating that personal engagement, but also helping prioritize it, right? We had the issue that we’re going to always run into, especially nowadays, is that we have this pull-back to direct engagement and personal connection and one-on-one engagement, but we also have this need to be more efficient and effective with our time because there are so many students to deal with, because we have staff shortages because of the great resignation, etc., a need for mental health and work-life balance for our teams, right? Otherwise, we get in that vicious cycle of continuing to lose people.

And that’s… the automation is supposed to solve all of that, right? It’s supposed to make it super easy. But we know that that’s not completely true, right? And there needs to be a human element to do all of this. And so, as someone in your position, what are some recommendations you have to really juggle those two competing priorities of making sure that we’re available and accessible and personal at the outreach to these students while also not completely burdening our staff to be working 24/7/365, because that’s not a realistic expectation, either?

[00:22:37] Samantha: Right, right. And if you figure out the perfect magic model, please let me know.

[00:22:43] Gil: Clearly, let’s call Mongoose.

[00:22:45] Samantha: Yes, yes, hey. But I think, you know, there is some strategy that has to be involved, some strategic planning and thinking. We have very good working relationship with, you know, we’re in, in an enrollment management model. So, it’s financial aid and admissions work very closely together. But using those resources, so admissions counselors, kind of, start on the front end. So, what tools can we, as financial aid, give to the admissions counselor, so they can have some of this conversation on the front end, so that my staff is not having to do that, too?

And so, using those strategic partnerships on campus, thinking about our folks in the bursar’s office or student accounts is what they’re called here. What tools do they need that’s financial aid information that we can share? And then working smarter, not harder. And so, we have, I am just blown away and in love with ChatGPT. And so, you know, if I’m sending out a personalized email, it’s likely that ChatGPT wrote it. But I just have a template that I’m switching out names and maybe adding one or two things that are my own words to it. Because there are tools that are out there and just making sure that you’re trying to use them and get more familiar with them.

Staff burnout right now in financial aid, you know, there’s a lot going on. It’s been a difficult summer. I’ve said this, and I don’t say it lightly. This summer has been more difficult than working through COVID. And some days it doesn’t feel like there’s… like, we’re going to get to a place where there’s a good FAFSA, but I think they will.

And so, as a leader, I think that’s our job, is to stay positive, kind of, think forward. But I do think flexibility is important where we can, making sure that our team knows. For me, right now, because we’re in peak season, it’s about relieving pressure. So, they’ve got all of these, this volume of work, this volume of students and families that are trying to come to them and just saying, “Look, there are so many hours in a day. Here are my expectations. And if you’re meeting my expectations, if we are 100 emails deep at 5:00, go home at 5:00, we’ll deal with the 100 email.” That’s my job as the leader to talk to administration about why we have that backlog or, you know, we can work through things, work through problems together. Communication is pretty important.

So, sometimes, I think it’s real easy to be, like, well, they know that I don’t expect them to work 24 hours a day, but have you said that? And so, having that conversation with staff, I think, is important. Trying to be as flexible. We’ve had a couple of folks that we do remote work at our institution, and so giving them extra remote work days to, kind of, make sure they have focused time to get what they need to do done, has been something that we’ve done.

And so, balancing that out, trying to use tools, trying to work smarter, using those strategic partnerships. And then, sometimes, it’s just getting together and saying, “Y’all, this sucks.” This has been a terrible summer. Let’s eat and talk about how bad it’s been. Sometimes, that’s just very helpful, too.

[00:25:44] Gil: Yeah, I think it’s funny that it brings me back to the Parks and Rec episode where I forget the names of the characters at this point, but every time his girlfriend is, like, complaining about something, he tries to solve every single thing and he has, like, all these solutions. And, like, all his friends are like, “Sometimes, you just have to sit there and say, ‘This sucks,’ right?”

And the minute he does that, it’s like people just sometimes just need to be heard, they just need to… I don’t need all the answers. I just need you to listen to me, right? And you get to that point of that with your staff.

It’s interesting what you said about remote work as an opportunity to give people focus time, because I feel like that’s where the narrative around remote work has shifted in a lot of places, where, prior to COVID, where it won’t work was, “Oh, that’s the day you’re going to be doing laundry and going for a walk with your dog and all those.”

And yeah, that does happen, let’s be honest. That’s what you do on remote work days. But you have that opportunity to really shut it all down, compartmentalize, and just heads down focus on what you’re going to get done, versus the water cooler talk versus the, just, jam session. Obviously, ideation and brainstorming, those sorts of things are important. But, you know, sometimes you just need that three hours to just sit and just get stuff done, right? And so, and while you can say that in an office, you can close your door or whatever, that’s not always the case. It’s not always the way people are set up, right?

And so, speaking to what you said about some of the “positives” of COVID are, you know, that, during COVID, we were forced to work, to push to remote work, which made us adapt our expectations around it in a positive way. And I think the difference between COVID and the FAFSA fiasco is, or the similarities are, we’re all in this together, right? I think that they’re a grace on all… I remember I was working at a virtual events company during COVID. And when a school had a tech glitch or when they had a problem or a presenter wasn’t super great, everyone was a little more forgiving of it, including students, right? Students were just, “I’m looking for this information. I’ll sit through five minutes of tech problems,” versus now, where there’s no patience for that. If there’s a microphone issue, whatever, I’m out, right?

And so, with the FAFSA situation, it’s we’re similar where we’re all, kind of, behoove into the process at this point. And it’s just about showing some grace and patience, is a big piece of this. And, you know, Amanda and I talked about this on her episode, and we’ll put a link to Amanda Craddock’s episode in the episode notes, too. So, you get this, like, FYI inception where you listen to her episode and listen to this episode and vice versa. There’s different longer-term impacts of COVID versus the FAFSA fiasco, but they’re both very challenging, right? With COVID, it’s the isolation issues. It’s the mental health issues that our kids that went through that process and grownups have to adapt to and work through, right? I see it even now with my kids who were elementary school, kindergarten, second grade at that time, right?

And now, with the FAFSA fiasco, it’s families that maybe didn’t go to college this year because they couldn’t figure out the plans and now do those people ever come back, or did we have this lost class through these challenges? So, one is and enrollment and opportunity issue students.

One is a longer-term mental health, anxiety issue, learning loss issue, and of course, this is the year that the students who are going through the FAFSA process are the students who are also impacted during COVID, right? And so, this is like a double whammy. And then, layering on top of that, all the students who are lower-income who  are dealing with those challenges, right? And so, as a professional in the space, looking ahead, what are some of the things we can do to, maybe, support this batch of students, specifically, from a retention and persistence issue, because that’s going to be the biggest challenge for them, is, even if we got them in, we got to keep them here, we got to help them to complete their degree and adapt and evolve?

[00:29:38] Samantha: Right, right. So, I think the students that actually make it, they’re going through the process or have gone through the process, they have a financial aid package. This is all they know. This is their first time, for many of our new students, first time going through the financial aid process.

And for some of them, it was very easy. They got online, did a form, and voila, it was done. They didn’t get their financial aid package until late many times, or, later than what we know, but to them, this is all they know. And so, I do think, next year, we will have to continue some of that prodding and that education and really working to say, “Hey, this is how the financial aid process works. The timing is what we might not know, but just so you know, once the FAFSA is available, you have to fill it out then.”

And, also… and I think it’s not really new. We, kind of, have always had to educate our students on the financial aid process every year, because things change. Even if it’s not a FAFSA, our scholarship processes might change. Their individual situations may change. But still, I think, working on that education piece, so doing things, we go into a lot of our university 110, our freshman seminar courses, and we, kind of, do a presentation on, “Hey, this is how financial aid works.” We also throw in some financial management stuff in there. But it’s a lot of “this is the process.”

Again, using those strategic partnerships, we talk a lot to our academic advisors to say, “Hey, if you’re talking to a student and they say X, Y, and Z, here’s what you can say to them, or here’s tools that you can give them. You can point them back to us.” So, working on that education piece, I think, is going to be important.

When I think about, like, retention, I think about two groups of students. So, we have a group of continuing students right now that are going through the process and because the formula for need changed, their financial aid package changed. I was talking to a student the other day and he received Pell Grant last year because he had a brother in college. That was one of the components of the need analysis formula that was removed, effective ‘24, ‘25. So, he lost his Pell Grant for ‘24, ‘25. And first of all, trying to explain that to a college student is not the easiest thing. It’s not the easiest thing when I learned it. I mean, it was like, “Wait a minute, this breaks my brain a little bit.”

So, trying to explain that to a person as they’re in it, and then saying, “Okay, what other institutional resources do we have? Do we have any foundation funds that we can apply to this group of students, that we can say, ‘Okay, when you came in last year or the year before you had the Pell Grant, due to these changes, you’ve lost that.’” And as an institution, can we supplant what you lost with other funds? And even going to our folks in the foundation and educating them to say, “This is something that happened. It’s not the student’s fault. The formula just changed. Are we able to put institutional resources or donor resources to this group of students?”

So, that’s one group. The other group I think about is the ones that you’re talking about, that they did not come to any college or they didn’t come to Coastal. And so, working with some of our transfer folks and admissions and saying, what can we do there on the financial aid side? So, holding… you know, transfer population is a little bit different, but holding virtual sessions with them, partnering with our local two-year schools and saying, what can we do there?

And then, those that just never went anywhere. Trying to find them, I think, is going to be difficult. And so, that’s, hopefully, where our friends at admissions will help us with that funnel and getting them back in, but thinking about, I feel like this is the whole, kind of, conversation that’s happening in higher education right now. Many of them may be in the workforce, and it’s going to be very difficult to convince them that going back to college is worth it. And I think that’s a conversation that needs to be developed a little bit further.

[00:33:33] Gil: Yeah, and I think there’s other conversations specifically around, what does higher ed look like for those types of students? Is it more of a, you know, stackable credentials or a skills-based learning or certifications? Everyone says this every year, and maybe, we’re going to start to mean it. It’s not just a four… the traditional path to a four-year degree. There are so many opportunities that students have to be able to get to that next level of their career by pursuing higher education and not just that traditional four-year program. And so, for a lot of institutions who are under that, revenue pinch with declining demographics, plus a big pocket of students who didn’t come this year because of the FAFSA issues, plus demand being on the decline from traditional models, is all of that work around modality and programs and so… and that’s a bigger, that’s a bigger conversation than what we decided to talk about today. So, we will tee that up for a future guest. We’ll get Ryan Craig or somebody to come back on to talk about that. I’ve got his book behind me here he was on. Well, we’ll link to that one in the episode notes, too, just for fun. Why not?

So, Samantha, I appreciate you being here and spending so much time with me this morning. I know it’s a very busy time because of everything that’s been going on. For folks who want to get in touch or continue this conversation with you, what are the best ways for them to be able to do that?

[00:34:56] Samantha: Yeah, I think the most common one people are reaching out to me right now on is LinkedIn. So, that’s probably the most common. I am on Twitter or X, but I don’t use it that much, but I’ll send both of those to you so you can link it. But LinkedIn seems to be the most common one.

[00:35:11] Gil: We will put a link to you, and to link to you. We will put a link to your profiles in the episode notes. So, folks, we appreciate you listening in and being a part of this conversation. Don’t forget to subscribe and, also, share this with your friends. And we will see you all next time on FYI. Bye!

[00:35:31] Samantha: Bye!

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