Scholarship Aid: Changing Lives Forever
Plenary Address
Quarterly Gathering, University Advancement
Kristin V. Rehder, Speaker
Tuesday, November 4, 2008 (Election Day)
Marquette University

Let me tell you a story, because today, throughout our sessions, we are going to be telling many stories about scholarship aid.

There was a young woman in Virginia who grew up in the 1950s and '60s in a remote farm town. Her parents were schoolteachers and she was the oldest of five children. The family didn't have money to send the kids to college. But this person was in the top five in her class and she played first oboe in the regional orchestra and also broke all of her high school's track records, wearing a pair of chucks. Does anyone know what chucks are?

She was offered a full scholarship to a great college nearby in Virginia, and she grabbed it. She decided to major in psychology and get a teaching certificate, because she admired her parents so much. In her junior year she went one afternoon on a psych practicum to a local "training school," as they called it in those days. It was an institution where people of all ages with serious intellectual challenges were sent to live. In those times the actual technical terms for the patients were words like moron and imbecile. She came home that afternoon and told her college friends that she was going to change what she had seen. She said she believed that all people deserved to have a chance to live independently and with dignity.

After college she went on to get her master's and her doctorate. And not too long after, she and her colleagues in special education developed a revolutionary national program of competitive employment for people living with severe intellectual disabilities. Today, when you see someone with an intellectual challenge working at a grocery store or at PetSmart or on a landscaping crew or in lots of other settings that's because of this person.

The person I have been talking about is my best friend. We met 38 years ago in college. And not only has she changed the lives of so many people in this country, she's also changed my life with her love, caring, commitment, humor, and high standards.

At our college 50 percent of the students were on financial aid. If they hadn't offered scholarship aid, I never would have met my best friend and who knows what might have happened to her dreams. And think of all those people—where would they be now?

Let me illustrate that point on Marquette terms, where 85 percent of the students are on aid.

I'd like you to take a moment and count off from 1-5, then start at 1 again and remember your number please. For this to work, we need for one table to follow another.

Now, I'd like all the 1s in the room to stand up. And all of the 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s to stay seated.

1s, if we could not offer financial aid at Marquette, congratulations, most of you would still get your education at Marquette. However, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s—no aid, no way. We're sorry. Please take a moment to look around your tables and the room to see, in this hypothetical case, whom you would be missing. It tells us a lot, doesn't it?

What matters most, though, when we talk about scholarship aid is not a statistic—not the percentage of our students on aid, how much unfunded discount we have, or who gets a Pell Grant and who doesn't. What matters is that scholarships change lives, one at a time. And we all have a story to tell. And when were working with donors, getting them to tell their stories and listening to them athletically is the first key to opening the door to a possible gift for scholarship aid.

I've told one of my stories, and we each have our own stories to tell in this very room. For example, there is someone here right now who never would have been able to come to Marquette without a scholarship. This person's mother died when she was a junior in high school and the family had no money to pay for Marquette. But thanks to a scholarship from Marquette, and the little help her father could give her one semester and for books, and the fact that she used most of the money she had in a small savings account, she came and excelled at Marquette.

There is someone else among us who was the first recipient of a class scholarship when she did her graduate work at Marquette, and while the award mattered financially, it was even more wonderful as an affirmation of her value as a student. And, she is so grateful that she's now established a scholarship in her mother's name because, among other things, she wanted to give back and to honor her mother's tender heart for those most vulnerable.

And there is someone else on our staff who wrote that he was able, thanks to a stipend from Marquette University during graduate school, to begin his professional career debt-free, which included 15 years of teaching at Marquette University High School.

And we have a colleague in financial services who wrote to say that she graduated from Marquette as a non-traditional student just before her 27th birthday. She was a divorced mother with a toddler and could have never come without a full tuition scholarship, and she's so proud to be back at Marquette University working her now.

And we have a dean of one of our colleges who wrote very poignantly to say he would probably be an unemployed steel worker in his hometown of Pittsburgh if it hadn't been for the scholarships he received—athletic and academic—to go to college and then on for advanced education. This person's family couldn't afford a car, much less college. His father had to commute to work over four hours every day, taking a trolley car and buses to get to his job. A fellowship helped him finish his dissertation and graduate with a doctorate, and now he's dean here at Marquette.

We have another person here with us today who works as a university fund raiser because the fellowship she received to do her graduate work back East was transforming for her and she wants to help make possible for others what was given to her.

We have a staff member whose dear friend came through Marquette on not one but three scholarships, which is fairly typical. He told her: People are not giving money; they are giving students the opportunity to grow as individuals in the Ignatian tradition, to be men and women for others.

Along those lines, from a staff member who is working to help Marquette become a special place to attract Youth of the Year winners through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America comes the story of Adella Deacon, one of 10 children raised blocks from Marquette in a Jamaican-immigrant family in Milwaukee's central city. Adella was, herself, the Youth of the Year in 1996 for Wisconsin and won a $25,000 scholarship on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She used that award to come to Marquette, also getting help from Marquette, and received a degree in physical therapy, breaking the cycle of poverty in her family. Two of her siblings followed her to Marquette.

But on our own staff comes another wonderful Boys and Girls Clubs story, leading to an important scholarship. We have a staff member whose grandfather, who is still living, grew up in a poor family troubled by alcohol. For a time, her grandfather's family was homeless. Eventually, her grandfather became active in the Boys Club in his neighborhood, became a pretty good athlete in a city league sponsored by the Boys Club, and managed to get a scholarship to college, met our staff member's grandmother, and started the family on a new and hopeful track.

And our scholarship stories extend beyond our borders of course. From a priest in East Africa and another in India, we hear about the power of the Jesuit International Fellowship which makes it possible for international Jesuits to come here for their studies. The cost of tuition in US universities is too high for Jesuits from developing countries. But when these priests receive their graduate degrees at Marquette, they return to do remarkable thing such a help develop the ethical guidelines for business in impoverished markets. And developing management and leadership skills for Jesuit priests from other countries.

After all these stories, let me tell a final one. Why do you think our own President, Father Wild, is so passionate about scholarship aid? Partly it's because a scholarship changed his life, too. As a young Jesuit, he received a named endowed scholarship to pursue his doctorate at Harvard. The scholarship had been given in the 1800s, and it gave our president the wherewithal to earn a doctoral degree in New Testament and Christian origins and to become a noted biblical scholar, but also to gain the credentials that allowed him eventually to serve as president of this great university. That endowed scholarship at Harvard, like those here, lives on. There will be many other Bob Wilds educated through that one gift.

And when it's a current-use scholarship, not an endowment, there is still a great multiplier—because the person who gets that scholarship today goes on to touch thousands and thousands of lives for many years to come.

I am sure there are over 100 stories in this room. During the days ahead I hope we'll have an opportunity to share many of them with each other.

Now I'd like to turn us in a slightly different direction and talk about how scholarship aid got started in this country. Please know that I am relying heavily on a book called Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America, by Rupert Wilkinson. And on many other sources from the Chronicle of Philanthropy to Dan Sullivan, Chair of the Board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and president of St. Lawrence University.

Who can guess what institution received the first scholarship in this country? That's right, Harvard. It was an amazing 365 years ago in 1643. It was an endowment given by a woman in London for the "yearly maintenance of a poor scholar."

I have always been interested in the fact that Marquette trustees will say boldly at a board meeting that people don't give to support scholarships, and that bricks and mortar is an easier priority to sell. What's closer to true from my perspective is that Marquette has been unusually strong at raising money for buildings, and we have not yet tried to raise large sums of money for scholarship support. And I think what we'll find from as early as 1643 forward is that people love to give to scholarships. They want to help others. They want to give back to places they care about. They are so grateful for what they have been given and they want to share that good fortune with others.

Now, what we've been talking about is private philanthropy but what about the role the government has played? To continue the history lesson for just a moment, I have chosen this election day, a number of initiatives tied to our country's presidents. Each of these became turning points in the history of scholarship aid in this country. The effect was to democratize aid for many people, not just for a privileged few.

1. The famous GI Bill of Rights is a landmark in federal aid. It was signed in 1944 by Franklin D. Roosevelt after World War II. At its peak in 1947, just over half of all college students in this country were on the GI Bill.
2. What world-changing event happened in the 1950s? That's right: In 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik, the first satellite in space, beating out the United States. You can imagine that many initiatives happened as a result, including the National Defense Education Act of 1958 which was really seeded in the work Harry Truman's Commission on Higher Education. The Act aimed to spark science and technology education with an undergraduate loan program as its centerpiece. Recipients had to have some need but also a superior academic background.
3. In the 1960s, we finally got a series of programs like Title IV, which provided money for low-income students with exceptional financial need. These programs were founded in the beliefs of John F. Kennedy who wanted a federal need-based scholarship program, and were carried out in Lyndon Johnson's time as part of Johnson's War on Poverty. These programs set up the basic pattern of financial aid that we know today: grants, loans, and student jobs.

Well, so much for the history lesson. I think we should all be better students of how aid has developed in this country, because in the story are important themes like who is privileged to get an education and who is not. And how is that decided?

Let me touch briefly now on a few developments nationwide over the last 25 years that have rocked the world of scholarship aid. Then I will set up how we came to the Scholarship Aid Initiative at Marquette and we'll spend the rest of the afternoon really focusing in on Marquette.

I was working at Williams College in 1991 when the U.S. Justice Department went after the eight Ivy League Institutions and MIT for cooperating to eliminate price competition. These institutions and a group of elite colleges called the Overlap Group, which included Williams, were places that gave financial aid based only on need, and they had been worried about merit scholarships creating a bidding war for students. So they had been cooperating on how they assessed students' financial need and gave aid out. They had all agreed to ban merit scholarships, and they would meet once a year in New York City to determine not just a similar aid package for students who applied to two or more of the colleges, but also to decide, to some degree, their tuition and fees. The idea was to keep things on an even playing field so students would get all the aid they needed, but could make a choice without being influenced by price or differential aid packaging. The government said this was a form of price fixing that limited an individual's or family's ability to get the best price and the most aid, so all the institutions eventually agreed to stop the practice.

What happened afterwards was not at all surprising. The wealthiest institutions, most of whom were in these groups, began to expand differential packaging—using their resources to reduce loan or job burden for their students in varying degrees. And merit aid began to creep in also. You may have heard of the Harvard decision last year which made all the papers: a family making $180,000 a year or less would be asked to pay only 10 percent, so right away that meant $18,000, if they were making $180,000, compared to the $30,000 they were probably paying. And, there were other changes. Remember, too, that Harvard has no loans in the financial aid packages it offers. (Princeton had actually ushered all this in ten years before but without as much fanfare.) Now all aided students for these schools and their competitors are getting more aid, and middle to upper-middle income students are being helped in tremendous numbers.

Why am I telling you these things? Because these institutions that I am talking about with their large endowments can afford to spend much more on the students they are trying to recruit. And you may say, well, that's not us, but look what happens in this country when basically anyone who is well-qualified academically to get a college education can find it cheaper to go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, than their local or regional institutions, even state schools. So the landscape is shifting, and education, no matter how you cut it, is expensive. More and more, in order to be able to get the kind of students we want, we will simply have to have greater resources.

What really worries me and many other people is that low-income families will not get their fair share. Over the last decade tuition and fees grew by about $15,000 at private institutions but average family income rose by only $460 for the poorest 20 percent of families nationwide. So, extra help is going to be key, especially at an institution like Marquette, with our mission for social justice, our historic ties to immigrant families, and our commitment to first-generation students.

Let me introduce you now to the afternoon's focus on the Scholarship Aid Initiative at Marquette by saying the following.

There is one fact and one fact alone that most helped me understand the importance of increasing scholarship aid at Marquette. Even after all the help we give students in grants, in jobs, in work-study, we have an average unmet need per freshman of over $6,000. That means in addition to the loans they are already taking, they have to go out and borrow more or work two jobs or charge fees to their credit cards or ask families to take home equity loads. And this is not acceptable to me personally, to know that there is that kind of gap between the cost of Marquette and a student's resources to pay plus all the aid we can possibly find in our budget to give them. So I have wanted to help Marquette close that gap. Because I want students who love our mission and who want so desperately to come here, to have a fair chance at getting here, staying here, and getting out with less debt.

There is, in fairness, a second fact that sways me: We offer students an amount of aid that stays the same for each of their four years here, no matter what our cost increases. So, even as tuition and fees goes up and the cost of living goes up, we do not, typically, increase a student's aid package. This makes staying at Marquette particularly challenging for some families.

Now I do care very much whether we are able to offer merit awards and graduate assistantships and fellowships and athletic scholarships, and to take care of legacies, too. These are important for Marquette. But in the current national and world economic crisis we find ourselves in, it is those with limited means and those who are stretched—those who are already struggling the hardest and those whose lives could be changed dramatically and who could change the lives of others—who will fall by the wayside if we are not organized to help. And we must be strong enough as an institution not just to help now, but to weather those roller coasters in the economy with aid for all of our students no matter the circumstances, because they are the heart of our mission.

So I have urged us not to work from a top down model of fundraising for scholarship aid where you focus primarily on the larger gifts, but from a bottom up concept, where everyone's gift can make a difference and where each of us has a role to play. Because, together, we can raise millions for this effort and put it to work not just for the long haul, but also right away.

Today, we'll find out who our next national president will be. I can't imagine that person waking up tomorrow knowing he will be President of the United States.

But I can imagine, because of this scholarship aid initiative, a high school student finding out he will be one of the first Presidential Scholars at Marquette.

Or a donor getting a letter from a student who is the first recipient of a new fellowship she's established.

Or a female athlete knowing she can go to Marquette to play women's volleyball on the scholarship she's been awarded.

Or an inner city kid knowing he's got a chance to get a college education at Marquette.

And what if you are the one to process one of these gifts, or write the report, or crunch the data, or ask someone to give, or send out the appeal. What if every time you take the smallest action in Cramer or 500 North or anywhere you are on campus, you could realize you are actually changing a life? What if?

Thank you for this time together this afternoon, and thank you for the privilege of Marquette in my life.

The information contained here may not be reproduced without credit to Kristin V. Rehder and/or permission to copy.
Kristin V. Rehder, November 4, 2008