Like many prospective college students, Valeria Torres weighed the cost of attending the University of Notre Dame before applying. The price could have turned her away, as it did for a quarter of surveyed high school graduates who chose not to enroll last year. Instead, the university's Pathways to Notre Dame program allowed her to choose the school where she felt she belonged.
Pathways to Notre Dame is an undergraduate financial aid program that meets 100% of demonstrated financial need without loans. The program helps ensure that students like Valeria can make enrollment decisions based on fit and opportunity, not just price.
Her story reflects what happens when financial aid works as intended. But financial aid is only one part of how students experience affordability.
We often think of enrollment as a single decision made the day a student accepts an admission offer. In reality, students continue to face financial decisions throughout their education, each with the potential to influence their ability to stay enrolled.
According to Ellucian's 2024 Student Voice survey, 59% of surveyed students have considered dropping out due to financial stress. Nineteen percent reported they had dropped out, with financial uncertainty cited as the leading cause.
The enrollment decision, it turns out, is rarely a single moment for students. They revisit it throughout their college career, every time a bill is due.
Every payment moment is a retention moment
Higher education leaders invest enormous time and energy refining aid strategies, analyzing enrollment outcomes, and communicating college costs to students and families.
Far less attention is given to what happens after a student accepts. Yet the financial pressures students face don't disappear after the enrollment deposit is paid. For many students, that's when those pressures become magnified.
While the financial aid package may help a student enroll, the billing process often determines how realistic it feels to stay enrolled.
Affordability must go beyond financial aid
Financial aid plays a critical role in expanding access to higher education. But even the most thoughtfully designed aid package doesn't eliminate the financial decisions students and families face throughout their academic career.
That's where billing either reinforces the promise of higher education or undermines it.
Can students easily understand what they owe, when it's due, and what happens if they fall behind? Does the billing experience treat a missed payment as a financial problem to solve, or an enrollment problem waiting to happen?
These may seem like operational questions. They are in fact student success questions.
A billing process that creates confusion, surprise, or unnecessary friction can undermine the very affordability goals an institution worked so hard to achieve.
Closing the gap between mission and practice
The University of Notre Dame offers one example of how institutions are thinking more holistically about access.
Through Pathways, Notre Dame partners with Nelnet Campus Commerce to offer payment plans that allow families to spread eligible educational costs into more predictable installments rather than large lump-sum payments at the beginning of a term.
As Micki Kidder, Vice President for Undergraduate Enrollment at the University of Notre Dame, puts it, "We want to ensure that finances are not a hurdle a student has to overcome to have the full Notre Dame experience."
Most institutions can’t afford to eliminate loans from financial aid packages. However, every institution can ask whether its payment practices reflect the same commitment to affordability that appears in its mission statement and strategic plan.
A question for your next enrollment strategy meeting
When institutional leaders discuss affordability, conversations often focus on aid budgets, discount rates, and enrollment targets. Those topics matter. But there’s another question worth asking: When the bill arrives, does it feel like it came from the same institution that sent the award letter?
A student may never know how much work went into designing an aid package. They will, however, remember whether paying for college felt clear, manageable, and consistent with what they were told when they enrolled.
Financial aid should be measured not only by what institutions award, but by how easily students can navigate what comes next. The challenge is carrying the promise made in the award letter through every financial decision a student faces.
For the students and families weighing the costs of attending your institution, the award letter isn’t the end of the affordability conversation. It's the beginning.
