A Message from Our Vice President of Enrollment Management

January is an important month in Otterbein University’s effort to enroll next fall’s class (of 2025!); it is when we begin to send our financial aid awards to admitted students who have filed the FAFSA. The strategic work of the months leading up to January is quite complex: how do we use our institutional aid in a way that brings to life our commitment to providing affordable access to academic excellence for families that don’t have the resources to be here on their own, and for families who have resources but would prefer not to use them.

It’s important to note that as a private university, one of our practices is asking families that have the means to pay for their education to pay more, so that families that don’t have means can pay less. We don’t hide this, but to be successful it requires all families to agree that we are best served by providing access to quality education to any student academically prepared to succeed, regardless of ability to pay. The outcome of this approach is enrolling an economically and racially diverse class (27% students of color and 32% federal Pell grant recipients) and seeing them perform as good as students who are not Pell eligible, and student who are white. In fact, the retention rates for Pell eligible students and students of color are stronger than their non-Pell and white counterparts.

Otterbein was founded to provide access to higher education to students who were not being served by other universities, and this mission still drives our work today. Our current financial aid practice has evolved from work we began to better serve Columbus City School graduates, and our successes allowed us to expand our programs statewide. Otterbein, through our last dollar Opportunity Scholarship, meets full unmet need to tuition for any Ohio resident whose family earns $60,000 a year or less, or who is federal Pell grant eligible, after all federal and state aid is applied to the students account. For these students, essentially EFC equals out-of-pocket, so they easily understand what they will pay. We also offer all of these students who choose to live on campus an additional $2,000 housing grant, and well over half of them choose to live on campus.

The other pillar of our commitment to affordability is transparency. Tuition Transparency to be exact. This is not a four year flat-rate model that jacks up each entering class’s tuition to the cost schools want students to pay in year four. We believe that a family should know, before they enroll, exactly how much tuition will increase each year they will be enrolled. With our Tuition Transparency model, we tell families, in their financial aid package, exactly how mush tuition will increase in each of the following three years. No surprises, no gimmicks, just total transparency.

Jefferson Blackburn-Smith
Vice President of Enrollment Management at Otterbein