Austen Award Allocator

Why It Matters

Using aid dollars wisely is vitally important to the health and effectiveness of an institution. The Award Allocator not only describes the current trends effecting your institution enrollment, but allows Financial Aid officers to experiment and find what aid mix is most effective in achieving their goals.

The Award Allocator develops a first awarding strategy and provides deeper understanding of your current strategy. It is important to know if your current strategy is working effectively and if there are ways to better leverage aid dollars. In the end, Financial Aid Officers need to know will they get the class, and at what cost? The Award Allocator can help answer these questions.

Proven Predictive Modeling Techniques

Our experience using sophisticated models assists decision makers in finding the precise allocation of gift aid, within budget, maximizing both net revenues and size of the incoming class.

The Process

Austen Group delivers a three-part process enabling conversation about the strategic use of financial aid dollars.

1. The Financial Aid Assessment is the initial analysis of the use of financial aid resources and financial aid packaging strategies. The assessment examines the latest enrollment cycle looking at financial, academic and demographic factors while considering the context of recent three-year trends.
2. The second part of the analysis includes creating a Leveraging Spreadsheet, an interactive simulation tool that allows “what-if” scenario testing. This modeling tool simulates the effect varying allocations of institutional gift aid have on enrollment and financial aid costs.
3. The third part (optional) is the Austen Award Tracker, which provides bi-weekly reports to monitor your aid strategy from packaging to enrollment.

How Award Allocator Works

The Allocator uses logistic regression to determine which variables increase the accuracy of predicting enrollment. While specific attention is given to the role of financial aid and institutional grant aid in particular, the model also estimates the independent effect of variables such as race, gender, geographic origin, academic ability and intended major. How aid is leveraged depends on the institution’s goals:

• Does the institution wish to maximize enrollment?
• Maximize net revenue?
• Maximize student quality?
• Meet student need?

The Award Allocator can focus on any of these questions and provides the important analysis needed to achieve them.