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Finlandia University has introduced a new $4,000 grant for students who graduated from an Upper Peninsula high school, and announced it is maintaining current rates for tuition and room and board for the upcoming year.
“Finlandia has a strong record of controlling price increases over the long-term and maximizing financial aid to prospective students,” President Philip Johnson said. “We can do more, however, especially for our neighboring communities in the Upper Peninsula.”
The $4,000 U.P. Promise Grant is geared to make higher education more affordable to incoming students from communities in the U.P., an area that the university has seen a disproportionate decrease in student population in recent years.
The short-term actions above, which are in addition to current levels of financial aid awarding for all students and a new $2,000 Service Scholarship for students located outside of the U.P., belong to a larger project for the university – a comprehensive redesign of financial aid practices.
“This redesign will ensure that we are distributing financial aid dollars in such a way that Finlandia remains affordable for growing numbers of academically successful students, including those in neighboring communities and from across the Upper Peninsula,” Johnson said. “Pricing is only one of Finlandia’s five enrollment strategy buckets: programming, pricing, recruitment, retention and marketing. Our strategic plan commits all of us to greater levels of effectiveness within and coordination among these five areas. No pricing strategy will have its intended effect unless coordinated with others.”
The redesign is expected to be in place for incoming students for fall 2018. The new scholarships are only for new incoming students in fall 2017, and can be combined with other merit-based scholarships and tuition initiatives, such as Finlandia Four and Finlandia Future. Assuming eligibility is maintained, all advertised scholarships, grants and tuition initiatives will be kept for all four years of a student’s education.
Story originally posted at finlandia.edu/news.
