A Commitment to Fully Fund Tuition Assistance

Woodberry’s current strategic plan, adopted by the board of trustees in 2016, calls on the school to “increase the endowment for tuition assistance in order to safeguard the school’s financial stability and, above all, its future excellence, ensuring an affordable Woodberry education for the most compelling candidates regardless of their families’ financial circumstances.”

Last year 44 percent of the student body received tuition assistance, with grants ranging in size from $5,000 to $57,000 for a total of more than $6 million in assistance. All of Woodberry’s tuition assistance is based solely on a family’s financial need; the school does not offer merit scholarships.

The school’s endowment currently holds almost $85 million in tuition assistance funds, providing slightly more than $4 million in grants each year. The Amici Fund provides the remaining tuition assistance. The business and admission offices estimate Woodberry would need to offer roughly $8 million per year in tuition assistance to remove financial considerations from the admission process. The board of trustees has set the goal of paying for all tuition assistance through the endowment and not relying on annual giving to fund long-term scholarship commitments.

“As a school, the greatest long-term threat we face is affordability, and the single most important opportunity of this moment is to band together as one community of Tigers to fund the entire tuition assistance budget in perpetuity through the Woodberry endowment,” says Headmaster Byron Hulsey ’86. “Reaching for such an audacious goal would place Woodberry in a rarefied cohort of exceptional schools.”

2018–2019 TUITION: $57,250

AVERAGE AWARD: $34,275

$6 million dollars awarded for 2018–19