Innovating for Access: PLU lives out its mission by blazing new trails | News

The sticking point, in Belton’s view, was an emphasis placed on the traditional model of awarding financial aid and scholarships. 

“It was all about the discount rate. ‘What is the discount rate?’ That’s all I ever heard,” he recalls. “It felt very limited.”

The discount rate is, in layperson terms, the estimated discount it will take to get a student to enroll at a given university. Traditionally, the higher a student’s GPA, test scores, and overall application, the higher the discount rate they would be offered – knowing that other institutions are also offering a competitive aid and scholarship package to that student.

“The problem is it doesn’t consider any of the student impact or outcomes,” Belton explains. “It doesn’t ask how much money are students borrowing to make that happen? How much money are we getting or are students getting from federal and local sources to afford the institution? It doesn’t do any of that. And it certainly doesn’t look at equity.

“At some point, a few of us finally started questioning if it should really all be about the discount rate.”

Members of the president’s council and enrollment management team started asking questions about their process and renewed their commitment to listening to prospective students, parents and community members. In the past, conversations often seemed to be about barriers. Now, exciting new opportunities were beginning to present themselves.

“It just started a whole conversation,” Belton says. “We started discussing things like how the university should define terms like ‘student merit’ and thinking critically about things like transfer student financial aid.”

AUGUST 2020: In response to the loss of campus activities and community during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, PLU announces plans to offer an additional tuition-free “PLUS Year”  year to all undergraduate students enrolled full time for the 20-21 academic year.

Mike Frechette grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts. Neither of his parents attended college. His father passed away when he was eight, and his mother put her three sons through college. Frechette attended Boston University on a loosely stitched combination of pell grants and scholarships. But it wasn’t enough, and his mother took on risky personal loans and credit card debt to help him graduate. Frechette didn’t realize it then, but while he was on campus, she was back home scraping by, often eating scrambled eggs three times a day to save every penny she could.

Frechette is now the ​​dean of enrollment management and student financial services at PLU, and a key member of the President’s Council and enrollment management team. He doesn’t mention his college days often at work, and jokes that his story isn’t part of the marketing plan, but he acknowledges that his experience undoubtedly motivates his work at PLU.