St. John's Prep educates young men to live, be, do, and stand for good. The Xaverian Brothers founded the school in 1907 around a vision Brother Benjamin captured simply: a place with good at its core — a place that could light the way. Fifteen thousand graduates later, that vision still guides the school.

A vision that big only works if the school can actually reach the students it's meant to shape. 

"Our board and I share a goal: that no qualified student is ever denied a Prep education for financial reasons,” shared Edward P. Hardiman, Head of School at St. John’s Prep. 

“It's an audacious goal — and to achieve it, we need reliable data and infrastructure that tells us how we're doing."

For years, the team made the system work, but with significant manual effort.

Owning the Awarding Methodology

Before Clarity, St. John's Prep ran its tuition assistance process on a platform whose calculations the school could neither fully understand nor adjust. 

"We did a lot of exporting and creating spreadsheets, then updated those manually before tuition assistance meetings. It was a lot of busywork before we could even look at an application," explained Greg Osborne, Assistant Head of School for Enrollment Management. 

For Angela O'Reilly, Director of Student Accounts and Cash Receipts, the previous platform's methodology had been opaque — the team couldn't see how the system arrived at a demonstrated-need number, and couldn't adjust the inputs to better fit St. John's families.

“Now we have full visibility into the methodology and we can adjust it ourselves. That's made a real difference in helping us feel more confident in our awarding process."

Awards That Match Actual Family Need

"We previously had this giant gap between what our awards were and what families said they could pay,” Osborne explained. 

“There's always going to be a gap between those two things, but with Clarity it’s become a lot less giant than it was — because it's a number we can trust."

"The simple reality is families talk and families compare,” noted Hardiman. “When the data coming back from your system isn't reliable, there becomes a lot of noise.”

“Now, the number we're getting for demonstrated need — we know where it's coming from, we know the methodology, and families can see it themselves,” he continued. 

"For middle school, the gap between demonstrated need and perceived need was 289% on our previous product. With Clarity, the gap is down to 60%. For high school, that gap went from 173% down to 17%.”

A Staff Member the School Didn't Have to Hire

“As tuitions rise and the economy shifts, more families are applying for tuition assistance. I can't imagine doing this without Clarity,” shared Osborne. “We're getting through more applications, and trickier ones, than we used to.”

"A couple years ago, there was a lot of discussion as to whether we needed another staff member focused on the processing of tuition assistance. Clarity has been able to fill that need. I don't hear that conversation anymore."

"If I had to ballpark it, I’d say it's about a 50% reduction in work hours," Hardiman added.

“Getting data out used to take weeks, if not a month. Now Greg can tell me in a very short period of time: we're meeting x percent of demonstrated need, this is what the average grant is across all students, this is what it would take to meet all demonstrated need, this is what it would take to meet all perceived need."

Meetings About Students, Not Spreadsheets

That recovered time landed somewhere specific for the St. John’s team: tuition assistance committee meetings.

"It used to take half a day of work before each meeting just to recalculate. Now the system does that in the background," shared O'Reilly.

"Our conversations are very different than they were previously,” shared Osborne.

“The hours that used to be spent reconciling spreadsheets we now use to have conversations that focus on: here's a student, here's our mission, how do those two things tie together?"

"Our team has time back to focus on meeting our enrollment goals," added Hardiman.

“Clarity is helping us have strategic discussions about how our tuition assistance resources are allocated and what our next steps would be so we can build sustainable enrollment for the long term.”

Serving More Students, More Confidently

The operational improvements show up where they matter most: in the school's ability to deliver on its access mission.

"Because the review process is significantly more efficient, we're able to make more thoughtful award decisions and spend more time considering extenuating circumstances," shared Osborne.

"We're proud to have families come from such a wide variety of towns, economic situations, and backgrounds — now we're able to treat individual situations more intentionally and thoughtfully," he continued.

"Our team can make tuition assistance decisions with confidence and consistency aligned with our mission: that no qualified student is denied a Prep education for financial reasons."

A Change Families Welcomed

Before the move to Clarity, one question loomed large for the St. John's team: how would parents handle the change?

"We had already changed systems twice in close succession. To ask our parents to learn yet another system was a little scary,” O’Reilly shared.  

"We had dealt with parents who were frustrated by the tuition assistance application process for a long time,” explained Osborne. 

“With Clarity, those frustrations have basically entirely gone away.”

“No one's going to sing your praises about the financial aid system you've chosen, but we are not hearing the complaints and the issues that we heard when we transitioned previous systems,” Hardiman added. 

“The transition to Clarity benefited us, but it also benefited our families,” said O’Reilly. 

A Platform That Fits the School

"No software is perfect because every institution does things differently,” noted Hardiman. “But our experience with Clarity is that we don't have to change what we do or how we do it based on constraints of the platform.”

“Instead of us trying to adapt to the platform, Clarity is empowering us to advance our mission. It's giving us insights into who we're currently serving, and showing us what targets to set to meet our goals.”