Conclusion

When Linda Livingstone became Baylor’s fifteenth president in 2017, she took on an enormous task: to clean up the sexual assault scandal that brought down her predecessor and restore the university’s reputation.¹ To her credit, Livingstone came to see, even before The Wall Street Journal article came out, that the university had been putting low- and lower-middle-income students’ families in harm’s way and made it a priority to do better by them.

As a result, the university steadily reduced the share of Pell Grant recipients it enrolled, from 19 percent in 2018–19 to 13 percent by 2022–23. And university administrators began contacting incoming students who had financial aid funding gaps exceeding $5,000 “to discuss lower cost options,” such as “starting at a community college and transferring to Baylor, or sitting out a semester to work,” according to The Wall Street Journal.² In addition, they began considering options for lowering the price for low-income students, including waiving tuition and fees.

All of these changes were aligned with Livingstone’s goal to improve student retention and graduation rates. Livingstone still had high aspirations for Baylor—to be a top-tier research university—but she wanted to approach these aspirations in a more responsible manner than her predecessors.

And that’s, in part, why The Wall Street Journal exposé was such a gut punch to university officials, who felt that they had turned a page on the Starr era. “My reaction was that Baylor was a very different institution at the time I was reading the article than the time the article was discussing,” Wesley Null, Baylor’s vice provost for undergraduate education and institutional effectiveness, said in an interview. “The article used three-, four-, or five-year-old data, so I was reading about an institution that didn’t exist anymore,” he said.³

While the article stung, it did have a positive effect: It built support within the institution for the proposal to lower the cost of attendance for low-income students. The university put the Baylor Benefit Scholarship Program in place in 2023, waiving tuition and fees for students from families with annual incomes of $50,000 or less. The program covers about half of the Pell Grant recipients who attend the institution. Low-income students who transfer to Baylor are not yet eligible for the benefit.

Baylor officials have been excited to see that student outcomes have substantially improved since the program’s inception. Pell Grant recipients have historically dropped out of Baylor after their freshman year at much higher rates than the overall student body. But now they are outperforming their classmates in terms of coming back for a second year. “For the first time in Baylor’s history, Pell students are pulling up the university’s average retention rates,” said Null. “The program is working.”⁴

Null and his colleagues would like to expand the program, either by widening eligibility for it or by making the program more beneficial for current recipients, by covering books or even housing. But they said that it’s difficult to fight for such changes at the same time the Trump administration is considering reducing federal student aid spending and slashing research funding. “Right now, there are so many pressures,” Null said. “It’s just a matter of what you’re going to pay for.”⁵

While university officials have turned the page on the Starr years, not everyone is so lucky. Take Kayla Foots, who was the first in her family to go to a four-year college when she entered Baylor in 2010, and her mother, a school bus driver.⁶

Kayla Foots’s mother and stepfather took out about $157,000 in Parent PLUS loans to send her to Baylor. Her family has been scrimping and saving to try to make payments on these loans since Kayla graduated in 2014. They did not make a lot of progress until the federal government wiped away about $100,000 of the debt when her stepfather died in 2020. “That is so crazy and so sad that that was the silver lining out of the situation,” Kayla told The Wall Street Journal.⁷

The Foots family is one of thousands that Baylor steered to Parent PLUS loans while it was on its quest for national recognition. Many of these families are struggling to make payments or have given up already. And they are not alone, because many other colleges and universities use enrollment management firms’ financial aid leveraging products and strategies that encourage them to engage in the same kind of predatory inclusion tactics as Baylor.⁸ These institutions have padded their bottom lines by putting low-income families in harm’s way.

We will not know the full extent of the crisis for a while, because students and parents did not have to make payments on loans for three years during the COVID pandemic. And the Biden administration did not collect on defaulted student loans for the next two years. President Trump has resumed student and parent loan collections, with much fanfare. Kayla’s family and many others may be caught in the crosshairs.