Marshall Magazine Autumn 2022

financial aid

Scholarship Portal MORE MONEY IN STUDENTS’ HANDS

D ur i ng h i s t en - ure as president o f M a r s h a l l University, Dr. Jerome Gilbert made it a priority to increase scholarship aid for the student body in the face of rising education costs, and thanks to the Marshall Rises campaign, scholarship aid has increased 44% over the last five years with 500 more students receiving aid. Part of the increase has been thanks to the hard work of the university’s

an application. Students could search most of the scholarships online at the financial aid site and college and department staff would work to pair students with appropriate scholarships, but awarding all available funding was still too big a task for the financial aid office. “There were hundreds of applicants and appli cations that would come through,” said Cody Call, associate director of opera

Staff members of the Student Financial Aid Office are using a new portal that matches students with scholarship opportunities.

Office of Financial Aid, which launched a brand-new way for students to apply for private scholarships through an online portal. Launched in January of 2020, the portal reduces the amount of time it takes both students and staff to find and apply for applicable scholarships. “What we were doing was trying to find scholarships for students by looking at the individual guidelines for each scholarship,” said Tara Hensley, senior financial aid counselor. “And then we didn’t really have something set up to where we could view a GPA or ACT score or the major they’re in or anything like that. We just had to search. And really, it was like countless hours.” Financial aid staff said before the portal, there were upwards of 400 private scholarships that each required

tions. “The paper was so much. We would open them all and there were some that were 20 per student. That would all get scanned in and filed away. It was a big pain. Then you’d have to review those, try to match up the scholar ship and look at all the information manually. Now, the portal does all of that automatically for us. One word to describe the portal was just efficiency for our office.” Students now fill out one application and are automati cally matched with the scholarships for which they qualify. “I think there are about 20 different departments, col leges and financial aid that utilize the scholarship portal now,” said Nathan Miller, administrative associate for financial aid and builder of the portal. The portal is a great resource for incoming students,

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