Financial Aid, Flexible Tuition, Tuition Assistance – whatever terminology your school uses – plays a vital role in broadening access to independent education. It enables students from families who cannot afford the full cost of attendance to enroll, thrive, and fully participate in the life of the school community.

When you compare the most recently available US Median Household Income ($83,730 per US Census Dept.)¹ with NAIS’s 2025/26 Average Day School Tuition ($33,361 per NAIS Facts At A Glance)² you can see how impactful this can be for so many families. Funny thing, though, it turns out that ‘the cost of attendance' is actually a moving target. That does not just mean that tuition goes up every year (it does), but it means that for most schools, tuition alone does not represent the full ‘cost of attendance’. Yes, discounting tuition can help get more students in the door, but what happens to them when they get there? 

In recent years, schools have begun to address the fact that a subset of their population struggles to afford textbooks, technology or field trip fees and may be unable to participate in sports, on-campus after-school activities and social events, solely because of cost. So, how do schools address this? To promote true inclusion, many schools have started Non-Tuition Assistance Funds – designed to help financial aid recipients to participate in all or at least most aspects of their school’s community life. 

Putting Non-Tuition Assistance into Action

That’s the “what” and the “why”, and those are actually the easy bits. It’s the “how” that can really be a challenge to figure out. 

Part One: Aligning with Mission

The first part of “how” is working with the Head of School and your leadership team to identify your school’s mission goals in this context: 

Does the school wish to provide support for all additional expenses, or only some? Are there limits to how many times a student can receive this additional support, or is the desire that support is open-ended? 

Some of these are big ticket items, like international trips, and some are smaller, like Model UN fees. Clear internal policies at the start are critical so that decisions aren’t being made on the fly later.

Part Two: Deciding How Much

The second part of “how” is deciding how much support the school can offer for these additional fees. This will involve some conversation with your Business Office beginning with: how do we fund this?

Some schools earmark a portion of their financial aid budgets for these kinds of costs. Other schools have seen their Board of Trustees designate funds for this purpose, and still others have enjoyed great success in fundraising specifically for a Non-Tuition Assistance Fund. 

Once you’ve determined your available funding, you can figure out how much support you can actually afford to offer families. Many schools have taken the position that they will simply offer the same discount on fees as they do for tuition, so if a family receives a 25% financial aid award, they would receive 25% off of textbooks, sports fees, etc. This is simple to understand, easy to explain, and certainly represents a huge step towards allowing these families to enjoy full membership in the school community. 

However, it's important to note that this approach can fall short for some families who already stretch to cover tuition and adding in these additional expenses, even at a discounted rate, may not be possible. That said, most schools cannot afford to pick up 100% of the cost of all additional fees for all students receiving financial aid, so the pro-rated approach is a solid path forward.

Part Three: Providing Support and Dignity

The third part of “how” is practical: How do you allow students and families to access these opportunities without having to publicly identify themselves as recipients of financial aid? 

The first step is telling families that this fund exists! It’s very important to proactively put this information in front of your families who receive financial aid, and to give them a contact person they can reach out to with questions. Ideally, that’s the person that they already know will be reviewing their application, so they don’t feel that anyone new is learning about their financial aid status. 

But you still have to grapple with access. 

In the case of schools with younger children, how might their parents/guardians be able to access after-care programs without divulging their status as recipients of financial aid to the Program Manager? Or for older students, what about textbooks? A school can order extra copies of textbooks, but how do you get them in the hands of the students who need them? You can’t exactly make an announcement that all recipients of financial aid should go to the office to pick up their books. 

Confidentiality needs to be respected, thus mailing the textbooks directly to the students’ homes solves for that need. If a student chooses to publicly identify themselves as a recipient of financial aid, that is their right. But equally, it is also their right to have that status remain confidential. And that need to respect confidentiality creates one of the biggest stumbling blocks that schools deal with when considering how to operate a Non-Tuition Assistance Fund. But with careful thought and a little creativity, this should not be a barrier to having and implementing such a fund.

Similarly, coordination with the Business Office can take care of a lot of this as well. The Business Office already knows who receives financial aid, as the Business Office is responsible for collecting tuition. So, for something like an after-care program, the Business Office can take the list of attendees and bill the families appropriately, applying non-tuition discounts per the school’s policies. And if a teacher has everyone who goes on a field trip sign a simple sign-in sheet, that sheet can then go to the Business Office, and families can be billed accordingly with no need for a teacher to ask about anyone’s financial aid status.

As any parent will tell you, there are countless other examples of additional fees that schools charge for different aspects of their school experience. With some care and intentionality around making Non-Tuition Assistance available in a way that preserves confidentiality, you can help improve access to the full community experience for all of your community members.

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^{1 United States Census Bureau - No Significant Change in Estimated U.S. Median Household Income}

^{2 NAIS DASL 2026 Facts at a Glance}