Maximizing the Use of Funded Scholarships: Insights from EdTech Maven Jonathan Fry
Welcome to the forefront of educational transformation, where innovation is paving the way for a brighter future for students everywhere. In today’s ever-evolving world, there are individuals driving change, and one of those individuals is Jonathan Fry, who brings a unique perspective to the table.
Jonathan leads Scholarship Magic, a company that helps higher education institutions maximize the impact of their scholarship management processes by streamlining operations, uncovering realities hidden behind obscure or inaccessible data, and helping obtain additional endowments.
His story is one of dedication, perseverance, and a deep-rooted passion for making education more accessible. From his beginnings at Accenture to his current role at the intersection of technology and scholarship administration, he has faced challenges head-on, with his mind always set on empowering students and institutions.
Join us as we embark on a journey through his career, uncovering the lessons learned and the vision that propels him forward through the complexities, triumphs, and aspirations that drive the ongoing revolution.
Can you please share a little bit about yourself, your family, and where you’re from?
I’m Jonathan Fry, the CEO of Scholarship Magic, which is a technology solution in higher ed that focuses on maximizing the scholarships that are available at an institution.
I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. I have three boys. One is still in university. One has recently joined corporate life and the other one is still in high school.
I am originally from England and came to the United States to go to university and ultimately stayed here.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Maximizing Financial Aid Efficiency: Leveraging technology streamlines scholarship administration, ensuring students access to every available opportunity for financial support.
What’s your professional background and tell us about the journey that led you to work in EdTech?
I joined Accenture right out of university and spent 25 years there. As you can imagine, in a company like Accenture, if you spend 25 years there — in the consulting world — you have a number of different roles and responsibilities as you progress in your career. During the last half, I was focused on the public sector industry and mostly in education; both in universities and in primary and secondary schools around the world. So, I spent a lot of time at universities, focusing on improving the student experiences, implementing technologies to provide efficiencies, both in the back office, but also student-facing technologies. Ultimately, I was responsible for all the work that we did for our clients in education.
The last few years of my time there, I became a leader in Accenture’s Microsoft Business. I was responsible for a number of things in the US, related to how Accenture partnered with Microsoft. I left Accenture last spring and wanted to get back into education; that’s where my passion lied. That’s what drew me to Scholarship Magic and being in the EdTech sector.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Driving Institutional Growth: Enhanced operational efficiency and improved enrollment outcomes propel institutional growth, fostering a thriving educational community.
What’s the thing that attracts you most about education in general?
I think a couple of things. One, it’s an industry that brings a lot of value to society. I mean, education is so important to the growth of society, both from the less tangible aspects regarding being better educated and learning, but also from an economic growth standpoint. Providing education, making it more equitable and accessible to more people, is a passion of mine. I’ve always been interested in expanding the reach of universities and higher ed. And I also think it’s an industry that hasn’t really taken advantage of the progression of technology in the last 10–15 years relative to what other industries are doing. I think that brings a lot of opportunities for us to really rethink the students’ experience, whether it’s on campus or online or in a hybrid model. It still hasn’t accelerated — like other industries — where you have pure digital experiences. There’s an opportunity and I see that really happening, especially with the advent of the progress in AI. So, there’s a lot of room for us to really make an impact in the industry and make it more accessible to students.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Embracing Digital Transformation: Institutions embracing digital tools offer students a seamless experience, positioning themselves as leaders in adapting to the changing higher education landscape.
What was your greatest challenge back then with Accenture and what’s your greatest challenge with Scholarship Magic?
Accenture is a brand that is so well known in the business world, but it’s not necessarily as well known within higher education. In higher education, there are a lot of consulting companies and technology solutions that are very focused. The clients in education don’t necessarily know the Accenture brand like some of the more public companies do. So, I think communicating to our clients the expertise that Accenture has, both in the depth of the industry, but also in the breadth of the things that Accenture could do was a challenge.
Then, when you think about Scholarship Magic, the biggest challenge is how do you not just take processes that are happening inefficiently or manually today and replace them with technology? While that’s fine, that’s not really the objective of the company. We really want to reimagine how scholarships are administered and matched with students, making sure that we don’t ask for information multiple times from a student and maximizing the scholarships that are available. There’s a lot of challenge in the Financial Aid Departments because of changes that happen at the federal government level with the Department of Education. So, positioning it to not only be a technology solution that makes processes more efficient, but also brings additional value in enrollments is something that we really want to focus on in the next year.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Empowering Student Success: Removing access barriers fosters a culture of support and opportunity, prioritizing student success above all else.
Can we delve into that a little bit more so people understand the way Scholarship Magic does things differently in terms of scholarships, grants, and the impact they can have on students?
Yeah, sure. How scholarships are administered and processed isn’t standardized across universities. Some universities will have a solution where you can have one application form for an existing student and that information is then looked at and analyzed and then processed against all the available scholarships. In other institutions, students have to apply multiple times because the scholarships have different rules. And in many universities, this is still done manually, which means that while the student may be filling out a form that’s on the website, the processing and matching of that student with the rules of the scholarships is done in a very manual manner.
One of the things that we want to focus on is the student experience. A lot of times universities have the majority of the information on the student already, whether it’s from the time that they applied at the institution or during their time in classes. So, you’ll know where they resided, what their major is, how their grades are et cetera, because they’re on your campus and they’re in classes and you’re capturing all that information. In many instances, you have the vast majority of data you need. So, you can then just focus on what’s missing versus asking them things you already know. Focusing on those things is what we want to do. The other thing is that our product allows you to forecast the use of scholarships. So, you can look at the incoming class of students that you are accepting and take the information about them to figure out how much of the scholarships can be used. That’s particularly important for universities today because a lot of them have revenue challenges and being able to use scholarships to discount the tuition for students is still revenue for the institution. This allows you to make decisions.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Innovating Financial Aid Administration: Pioneering innovation in financial aid administration empowers institutions to fulfill their mission of providing accessible and affordable education for all.
EdTech Mentor interview, Jonathan Fry, CEO Scholarship Magic.
Can we talk a little bit about your growth strategy and what are your goals for Scholarship Magic?
We are very much in the early stages of our growth trajectory and with that come high expectations of what we can achieve in the next few years. We certainly think that we’ll be moving into a hyper-growth mode in the next 12 to 18 months, and by that, what I mean is really accelerating the number of institutions that we partner with.
So, to do that, if I go back to some of the things I talked about with the challenges of Accenture around branding, it’s particularly important for us to brand ourselves in a way that’s differentiated in the market and brings tangible outcomes to our customers. And so that brand presence and being able to articulate the value that we’ll bring are very important things for us right now as we look to really start going out to the market and talking to institutions. We have competitors out there and being able to differentiate ourselves is particularly important. We not only want to fill a gap that’s out in the market today, we also want to improve our market share by taking customers who may be using an existing competitive product. All that is wrapped into our sales and marketing strategy.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Navigating Financial Aid Complexity: Simplifying financial aid processes offers a comprehensive solution aligned with regulatory requirements and institutional goals.
Can you share a couple of figures, so people from outside the U.S. understand the potential impact of a solution like Scholarship Magic?
Scholarships are a very critical part of higher education in the U.S. It’s a key component around making education more affordable. And something that’s very important are the institutional scholarships. We’ve seen a growth over the last 10 to 15 years on the importance of these scholarships because they’re becoming more and more part of the financial aid package for a student. If you think about the options that are out there, there are loans that are given out by the federal government, there are certain grants that universities can provide, and then there’s scholarships that are funded by donors. That’s really where Scholarship Magic wants to focus on: How do you utilize those funded scholarships? If you think about a pie of how tuition is paid, scholarships are becoming a larger piece of that pie. This is an area that’s seen significant growth to the tune of over 6 billion dollars of scholarships and grants handed out last year just in the U.S. in higher education. Those aren’t just institutional scholarships, but it’s a significant part of that. So, it’s important that we manage donors at our institutions in a very effective way.
So what Scholarship Magic looks to do is be able to highlight the impact that an individual donor is providing. It could be through a donor impact report, or it could be by automating the thank you letter process where a student is thanking a donor for giving the money and for them receiving the scholarship. But it’s also bringing the process together. There’s a different department that manages the donors and the money that’s coming in; it’s called advancement or development depending on the school. So, with Scholarship Magic on your side, you get visibility in real time on how scholarships are being used. What that allows is for an advancement professional to be able to go out and have a conversation with a donor that says, hey, we don’t have enough students that meet the criteria, if we just relax these one or two criteria, we’ll then be able to maximize the use of your donation. Also, all that analytics and data and reporting is visible within the process itself, not after you’ve already made the decision. So, there’s a number of areas that we look at.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Personalized Scholarship Matching: Prioritizing the student experience minimizes redundant paperwork and maximizes scholarship matching, enhancing accessibility and equity in higher education.
What are those caveats or those things that you need to keep in mind when engaging with higher education institutions to sell them a solution?
At the end of the day, you can’t look at higher ed as just another consumer industry. So, we view students as something more than a customer. We’re here to fulfill their educational promise and provide them a place to be able to have a great experience. Whether they are 18–22 years old or an adult learner, it doesn’t matter. The ultimate objective is to educate the student. There are principles around marketing in higher ed that are unique to the industry. There’s certain regulations and rules that are out there that allow you to do certain things but don’t allow you to do other things that other industries can. It’s not an industry where you want to maximize your profit per student, because that lends to different practices that a number of for-profit universities were fined for. So, how you think about marketing the student is unique within the industry.
A lot of institutions, today, still send out information in the mail. If you’re a 17-year-old — my son’s in this process right now — every couple of days you’re getting something in the mail about an institution, because they know that you’re going to be making a decision in the next 12 months. That’s certainly a way to engage not only the student, but the parent who’s obviously supporting that student in that decision. But there’s digital means too. So, things like your website are becoming much more important than it would have been 10–15 years ago. I think higher ed needs to continue to advance, particularly in the digital space, around having an engaging experience for students as they’re deciding. If, for example, you go into a website and it’s hard for you to find what are the financial aid levers that are available to an institution; whatever that number is for full tuition; you may never apply to that school because you don’t think it’s actually affordable, when it actually could be. We need to continue to work providing as much clarity and visibility to a prospective student as they need to be able to make an informed decision.
And how you market to an adult learner is very different. An adult learner, in many cases, may have a couple of kids in the house and has a job and is looking to make a career change and they have minimal time. The time that you have an adult learner’s engagement and focus is very valuable. That’s certainly an important part of how you’re branding yourself.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Strategic Scholarship Utilization: Empowering institutions to forecast scholarship usage enables proactive decision-making to optimize financial aid resources and support student success.
So, I would like to change a little bit more towards your personal profile and background. What would be your career advice to your 20-year-old self?
I think when I was 20 years old and thinking about what I would do in my career, I was in a hurry. I wanted to be successful fast and always wanted to be on the forefront of the newest technology, the newest thinking, the newest strategy. And, you know, those things are important because they provide your drive and focus and in your career. But, at the pace that technology is changing today, what’s actually more important is agility and the continued thirst to learn. Understanding how to be able to navigate between the different technologies that are out there, and the different challenges that are happening in the geopolitical world, because all those things are very impactful to organizations. Continued learning is far more important than being at the forefront of whatever the big hottest technology is because it’s going to be different tomorrow.
Also, one thing I didn’t particularly understand, but as I look back on my career, was really important, is culture. Understanding the culture of your customers and the organization that you’re employed with drives the values that you have as you progress in your career. You learn things about how you want to operate, and as you become a leader, how you want to manage people and work with people. I guess, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, at the end of the day, it’s all about the people and your customers. Focus on those things, and you’re going to be successful and enrich yourself.
I know that you had a global responsibility back in Accenture. Was there a particular anecdote, culturally speaking, that stands out in your history back in Accenture that you can share with us?
There’s quite a few. From a geographical standpoint, I had the pleasure of working quite a lot in South America. When I was first working there, it took me a little while to adjust because I realized a lot of the decisions and strategies were happening before the meetings. That required a prioritization of relationships. Being in a culture where relationships were a very important aspect of working with the customer was really eye-opening to me.
✨ Pearl of wisdom: Unlocking Scholarship Potential: Transforming scholarships into dynamic tools promotes access, equity, and academic achievement, unlocking their full potential for student benefit.
Was there a part of your responsibilities that you didn’t really enjoy, that you didn’t really feel comfortable about back then?
I think, when you’re a public company and a company that’s large, there are rules in place from a governance standpoint and decision making, on what deals or customers you want to pursue. This isn’t unique to Accenture. I think any large corporate company goes through this. There’s a lot of decision points that you have to go through to get approval. Also, what I was probably more successful at was being in the market and talking to customers. So, that internal part of the job didn’t bring me as much joy as the client-facing part. That’s part of the reason why I’m doing what I am today, because it puts me out in the market.
✨ Pearl of wisdomEmbracing Digital Transformation: Institutions embracing digital tools offer students a seamless experience, positioning themselves as leaders in adapting to the changing higher education landscape.
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