With the economy wobbling, financial aid at Ohio State is in high demand.
The number of students applying for financial aid is up by 30 percent this year, said M. Dolan Evanovich, OSU’s vice president for Strategic Enrollment Planning, at the Board of Trustees’ Audit and Compliance Committee meeting Wednesday.
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n total, 84 percent of the 61,568 students at all OSU campuses received some form of financial aid last year. Between loans, grants, and scholarships, OSU students received $741.8 million. This total, which includes $250.5 million from OSU, is up from $708.2 million two years ago.
The increase in demand for aid has collided with a decrease in aid supplied by the state. The state’s cuts to the Ohio College Opportunity Grant, the state’s largest need-based aid program, amounted to about $10 million for OSU students this year.
OSU has taken steps to manage this mismatch between supply and demand. Diane Stemper was hired to lead the Student Financial Aid office, which has 60 full-time staffers.
The aid supplied by OSU has been increasing, Evanovich said.
“The institutional commitment is huge,” Evanovich said. “We’re committing probably close to $82 million… for both need-based and merit-based aid, and that trend line has been going steadily up.”
OSU also pulled $5 million from the budgets of its campuses to create the State Grant Replacement Fund, designed to replace the lost OCOG money for OSU students for Summer and Fall Quarters.
Still, challenges remain for OSU. Even though the family of an OSU student is, on average, more affluent now than a decade ago, many families who were looking at private or out of state schools are now looking at OSU.
“We’re going to need to put more scholarship money on the table to attract them,” Evanovich said.
OSU is also working with families of first-generation college students to help them understand the types of aid available, Evanovich said.
