Kincaid University's full cost of attendance now tops $58,000 a year, a figure that has priced out many of the same Bellwater families whose neighborhoods the university sits among. President Howard Faircloth's answer, announced this week, is the largest single-year increase to need-based aid in the school's recent history.
The increase brings Kincaid’s total need-based aid budget to roughly $34 million annually, according to figures President Howard Faircloth presented to the university’s board of trustees. Faircloth said the expansion is intended specifically to reduce the average student loan burden for students from Bellwater’s lower-income neighborhoods, a group he said has been underrepresented in Kincaid’s applicant pool relative to the city’s overall demographics.
“Kincaid sits in a city where a huge number of families could never realistically pay our sticker price, and for too long our aid packages didn’t fully reflect that reality,” Faircloth said. “This isn’t charity. It’s an acknowledgment that a university claiming to serve this city needs to actually be reachable by the people living in it.”
A local enrollment gap
Financial aid director Rosa Delvecchio said Bellwater residents currently make up about 9 percent of Kincaid’s undergraduate student body, despite the city and its immediate suburbs accounting for a much larger share of the surrounding region’s population. Delvecchio said internal survey data suggests cost, not academic qualification, is the primary reason many high-achieving Bellwater public school graduates don’t apply to Kincaid at all.
“We were losing students before they ever submitted an application, because the sticker price alone told them not to bother,” Delvecchio said. “The expanded aid budget lets us guarantee a more generous package upfront for local students from lower-income households, rather than asking them to apply first and hope the numbers work out.”
Tied to a broader fundraising push
The aid expansion comes as Faircloth is in the early stages of a $200 million capital campaign he launched to fund new facilities and academic programs, and Faircloth said a portion of the campaign’s fundraising goal has been specifically earmarked for endowed financial aid funds rather than construction. “Buildings matter, but if the students who would benefit most from this university can’t afford to walk into them, the buildings aren’t doing their job,” Faircloth said.
Kincaid sits in a city where a huge number of families could never realistically pay our sticker price, and for too long our aid packages didn’t fully reflect that reality.
Dr. Howard Faircloth, President, Kincaid University
Skeptics want to see it in the numbers
Not everyone is convinced the announcement will meaningfully change who enrolls. Community advocate Loretta Simms, who runs a college-access nonprofit serving Lowertown high school students, said she has heard similar aid announcements from Kincaid before without seeing a corresponding jump in local enrollment. “An extra $6 million sounds significant until you divide it across a student body this size,” Simms said. “I want to see the actual average aid package for a Lowertown family before I call this a breakthrough.”
Delvecchio said the university will publish updated average aid figures by household income bracket after the first full admissions cycle under the expanded budget, and that Kincaid has set an internal goal of raising local enrollment from Bellwater’s city limits to 15 percent of the undergraduate student body within five years.
A student who almost didn’t apply
Junior Marisol Ferreira, a first-generation college student from Cedar Hollow, said she almost didn’t submit a Kincaid application at all after seeing the published cost of attendance, applying only after a high school counselor pushed her to at least see what aid package the university would offer. “I had basically written it off before I even opened the application,” Ferreira said. “My aid package ended up covering most of the gap, but I only found that out after I applied. A lot of my friends never got that far because the sticker price alone scared them off first.”
Ferreira said she has since become an informal ambassador for the university’s outreach efforts, speaking to prospective students at her old high school about her own experience navigating the aid process. She said the biggest barrier she still hears from younger students isn’t the aid packages themselves, but simply not knowing they exist before ruling Kincaid out. “Nobody tells you the real number is negotiable until you’re already in the process,” she said. “The university could do a lot more to get that message out earlier, before students even decide not to apply.”
How Kincaid compares to peer schools
Delvecchio said the university benchmarked its aid expansion against a handful of similarly sized private universities in the region, several of which have made comparable investments in need-based aid over the past five years as sticker prices at private institutions nationally have climbed well ahead of inflation. She said Kincaid’s $34 million total aid budget still trails some larger peer endowed institutions but represents a larger share of the university’s overall budget than at several comparably sized schools.
“We’re not the wealthiest university in our peer group, so we have to be more deliberate about where every aid dollar goes,” Delvecchio said. “That’s part of why we’re targeting this increase specifically at local, lower-income students rather than spreading it evenly across the whole aid pool. We think that’s where it does the most good, both for those students and for the university’s relationship with this city.”
Faircloth acknowledged the university has more work to do beyond the dollar figure, including expanding outreach to public high schools in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow that historically send few applicants to Kincaid. He said the university plans to hire two additional admissions counselors dedicated specifically to those schools, funded separately from the aid increase.
“I’d rather be judged on enrollment numbers three years from now than on a press release today,” Faircloth said. “But we had to start somewhere, and the aid budget was the piece we could move fastest.”