When Rasheed Mustapha got into Loyola University Maryland, he tried to temper his excitement. The private college in Baltimore was his dream school, but its $57,000 annual tuition was too much for his family to afford.

Then he received Sellinger funds, a need-based scholarship program for Maryland residents who attend private colleges in state. That, the Beltsville native said, was a game changer.

“I was really excited,” Mustapha said. “The scholarship gave my parents and my family a lot, it gave me the freedom to go to Loyola.”

About half of the $115,000 in financial aid he was offered for four years comes from Sellinger funds. But now Mustapha’s future at the private college is in jeopardy.

The scholarships of thousands of current and future college students are in the hands of state legislators, who are now weighing whether to cut funding for the Sellinger program by 50% for the second year in a row. For small private colleges with already-tight financial margins, the potential cut could be devastating, several of their presidents said.

Established in 1973, the Sellinger program once helped 14,000 students access higher education each year, according to the Maryland Independent College & University Association, though that number dropped to just over 5,000 after last year’s cuts. At some colleges, the scholarships go to hundreds of students — sometimes as many as 1 in 5 — often as a chunk of a larger financial aid package.

While Gov. Wes Moore didn’t include cuts to the program in his proposed budget, the Department of Legislative Services has formally recommended the Sellinger program be cut in half, from about $72 million last year to $36 million, citing the state’s $2.7 billion deficit. The office did not respond to requests for comment about the recommendation.

“A 50% reduction for the second year in a row seems as if the state is truly rooting for our demise,” said Matt Power, the president of the association, at a legislative hearing last month.

At Mount St. Mary’s University, a small liberal arts university in the Catoctin Mountains, the cut could be detrimental, said President Gerard Joyce. About one-fifth of the university’s 2,450 students received Sellinger scholarships this year, ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, to help with the price.

“It would have an impact on our operating budget for years to come,” Joyce said.

The university’s endowment is $59.2 million, which is smaller than that of most private colleges in the state. Endowments are collections of funds, usually donated, that are invested by a college to provide ongoing financial support for its mission. Typically, schools only spend the invested returns. Colleges with smaller endowments like Mount St. Mary’s University get less in returns and rely more heavily on other funding, like Sellinger. But even colleges with larger endowments are ringing alarm bells.

Hood College, a school in Frederick, has an endowment of $128 million. Still, interim President Debbie Ricker said the 50% cuts to the Sellinger program would have a “devastating financial impact” on the college.

“To see that Sellinger could be cut in half again was really a punch in the gut for us,” Ricker said. “If we want to sustain that level of support for Maryland students, then we have to find those resources in our operating budget somewhere else, which is already incredibly lean.”

Students at Hood are likely to suffer if state legislators decide to cut Sellinger funds, she said.

“It will mean a leaner student experience overall, and leaner resources for us to drive innovation and creative programming,” she said, though she declined to specify areas where the college would have to scale back.

But it’s not just students who stand to lose something. Oftentimes colleges are economic hubs for the towns and cities they’re in. When a college takes a hit, so do its employees who live in the region. Small, independent colleges are fragile — one per week closed in the first half of 2024.

After Sellinger funds were cut by 50% last year, Notre Dame of Maryland University had to cut staff positions in order to keep offering the same financial aid to students who earned the scholarships, university President Marylou Yam told state legislators in a hearing last month.

In the 2024-25 school year, Notre Dame of Maryland provided $1.7 million in Sellinger financial aid grants to 377 of its roughly 1,800 students. The university’s school of education is the largest private provider and top five overall provider of new teacher certifications in the state, Yam said.

Less money from Sellinger, Yam argued, means that Notre Dame of Maryland will be able to graduate fewer teachers, which the state needs amid its teacher shortage.

As colleges send out admissions decisions this month, the weight of potential Sellinger fund cuts, which likely won’t be decided until April, are heavy.

“We’ve already sent out our acceptances with the financial aid packages,” said St. John’s College president Nora Demleitner. “We did that thinking we would get Sellinger funding, which means now we’re going to have to cut from someplace else.”

That, Demleitner predicted, would be student support services and community-facing programs like academic advising, career counseling and wellness services. But it would be worth it, she said, to continue to offer financial aid to students.

Forty-two other states in the country help fund their private colleges and universities. Sellinger funds currently account for 4% of Maryland’s education budget, which means the state ranks in the top quarter in the country for state funds supporting private colleges, alongside other states with highly educated populations like New York and Pennsylvania, according to a report released by the Maryland Independent College & University Association.

On average, about two-thirds of students stay in the state that they graduate college in. That means that Maryland students who receive Sellinger funds to go to an in-state college are far more likely to work in state, as well.

“For every one high school student we bring into Maryland to become educated, we export two,” said Terrence Sawyer, the president of Loyola University Maryland. “Many of those kids don’t come back.”

Loyola University Maryland, which has a $302 million endowment and just over 5,000 students, awarded about $11.5 million this year in Sellinger fund scholarships to 965 students.

Sawyer said the potential cuts would have a “dramatic impact” on his university, which he said runs “very, very thin margins.”

The Loyola president said his team will work hard to avoid cutting back on student aid, especially to current students like Mustapha, the first-year engineering student from Beltsville. But, Sawyer said, “I can’t get blood from a rock.”

Mustapha said he’d need to evaluate his options if his Sellinger aid gets cut. His second-choice college, West Virginia University, could still be an option, even though he doesn’t want to be too far away from his parents and his younger sister in Prince George’s County.

“I’ve gotten really close to some staff and faculty, and they’ve really helped me,” Mustapha said. “But if the funds were taken away, it would make more of a stress on my parents, and I’d rather do what’s easiest for them.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.