Gabrielle Martin was admitted in fall 2025 as a first-year biology major, but left after winter 2026. She went into Seattle University with two school-appointed scholarships alongside scholarships from outside organizations and work-study, but ultimately found that it wasn’t enough to keep up with tuition. Following national changes to federal funding, Martin also had to reconsider her plan to work towards medical school. 

“I fall into the middle group where I don’t have low enough household income to qualify for FAFSA to really be helpful, but I also don’t have it high enough where I can pay on my own,” Martin said. 

Most aid eligibility is determined by the Student Aid Index (SAI). To qualify for the Pell Grant, a student’s SAI has to fall below a certain income cutoff determined each year. The maximum amount allotted by a Pell Grant is reserved for those with an SAI of 0 or less. Usually, an SAI of 0 is applied to household incomes of roughly $40,000, with the maximum income eligible being around $60,000. The 2025-26 SAI and Pell Grant Eligibility Guide shows that the formula used to calculate students’ eligibility for aid can make it difficult for households with modest incomes to qualify for anything. 

Martin is now a second-year health and sciences major after transferring to UW-Milwaukee, where the tuition for out-of-state students is $24,368 per academic year. At Seattle U, it’s $54,900. When housing, a meal plan, supplies, personal expenses and institutional fees are factored into the cost, the estimated sticker price of attendance for the year is $71,146. 

To continue her journey to medical school, the transfer was financially unavoidable, though Martin was sad to leave Seattle U’s facilities. 

“The things that are offered there are great, especially for students in STEM. The research opportunities, everything is just so great,” Martin said. 

More than 95.8% of Seattle U students receive financial aid from the school, which adds up to $145 million worth of scholarships, loans and grants. Additionally, the university has an Institutional Gift Aid Guarantee, which states that all incoming undergraduate students are promised at least the same amount of institutional gift aid they receive their first-year. As long as students enroll in the FAFSA each year, keep up academic performance and stay enrolled full-time, their total award will not decrease. 

On a national level, the state of higher education has become uncertain with rising tuition costs, FAFSA delays and loan policy changes like those in the Big Beautiful Bill, which will limit the options for debt forgiveness and qualifications for loan borrowers. On a local level, students may not be withdrawing in large numbers, but national data shows that, starting in 2023, more students began opting for community college over four-year institutions. 

Seattle U’s retention rate has remained steady at 85% since at least 2014, not including the COVID years. According to Kate Elias, vice provost for student success, the school has recovered from those losses and returned to an 85% retention rate for the cohort that entered in 2024.

Cost is certainly an important factor when considering any four-year college, but Elias can’t say that it’s driving students to question the value of higher education. 

“Our data instead indicates that students are more likely to leave SU if they experience academic challenges early on, particularly poor grades during their first year. Students who face academic challenges and also have high financial need are at even greater risk of leaving the university. Additionally, when students do leave SU, they often transfer to another higher education institution rather than stop out of higher education altogether,” Elias said. 

The National Student Clearinghouse (NCH) collects data to help institutions secure educational insight. 

“We do not provide a stop-out rate – just the number of stopouts,”  Hannah Gillis, an NCH worker, wrote in an email to The Spectator. A stopout is any student who stops enrolling in classes at a university for a given period of time. Stopouts may sometimes re-enroll at the same or another institution. 

In their Some College, No Credential (SCNS) report, the NCH tracked the number of students—not the reasons—who have stopped out of college. The SCNC population tracked by the NCH reached 43.1 million Americans at the start of the 2023-24 academic year. According to their data, community colleges are both the primary source of stop-outs and the top place for re-enrolled students. Over 52% of re-enrollees go after an associate degree, with over 47% applying to two-year public colleges.

Some college students consider transferring because of the daunting experience of their first year, but eventually realize that it’s all part of growing up. Coming from Colorado, Jillian Hesse, a fourth-year cell and molecular biology major, thought everyone went through a period of wanting to transfer back home. Even more, she had to deal with expenses on a new level.

“When you’re 18, 19 years old, and you already have thousands and thousands of dollars in debt. That’s horrifying,” Hesse said. 

Hesse wasn’t struggling academically, but was overwhelmed adjusting to a totally new environment in college. In order to gain some semblance of control, she did a deep dive into transfer options, comparisons and processes, but never brought it up to advisors or family. After her first year, Hesse established a routine and began building a life for herself in Seattle, leaving her with little urge to transfer. 

“It kind of just fell off my radar. I really started to connect and fall into place here,” Hesse said, later adding, “I got really into the weeds… but as I got more comfortable, I could step back and be like, ‘okay, this is big and scary, but it’ll be okay.’” 

Now, as a fourth-year student still at Seattle U and about to graduate, Hesse is confident in where she’s at and says to anyone generally feeling the urge to transfer: try to hold on and get through the uncomfortable bits to see how you feel coming out of those moments. 

Many programs, such as Washington State’s Running Start (where high school students can take community college classes and get credit), give students a head start in their higher education journey. This is usually done with the intention of getting ahead and also saving money. But sometimes there are instances where the credits don’t line up. For Ava Wojahn, who was admitted into Seattle U’s nursing program—her dream school—with an associate degree from Running Start, this was her plan; however, it didn’t follow through. 

Wojahn received a message before the 2025 winter quarter of her freshman year notifying her that her prerequisites were not valid to take a certain biology class. 

“They did an audit of my credits and decided I actually no longer met the requirements, even though I had originally been told that I would,” Wojahn said. 

It was the week before Christmas break, and she was told that she would have to retake the prerequisite at a community college. This meant having to pay for another class alongside her Seattle U classes. After a long process trying to fight for her credit’s value, including her parents’ help, the lack of support she received from the administration led her to transferring. 

“The debt I’m going to be in after I leave this place [Seattle U] is not worth it for the education I’m getting,” Wojahn said. 

After finishing her first-year spring quarter, Wojahn transferred to Bellevue College and is now working to apply to their two-year nursing program. 

Issues of financial strain, academic difficulty and overall stress have created a pattern that institutions are working to understand. While the NCH is tracking the number of national students dropping out and Seattle U tracks local numbers, the reasons behind students’ actions aren’t as apparent with those numbers. 

In the end, the stories of both students who have left and those who have stayed offer additional context to the national numbers and data. The number of SCNS isn’t just a graph growing into the millions; it’s students with stories similar to Hesse, trying to decide between the anxiety-filled landscape of college or the familiarity of home. Or students like Martin whose ambitions have to navigate the financial realities of larger universities, and those like Wojahn whose attempts to work ahead get delayed by administration red tape. 

Dreams are being weighed against debt, and ambition is being challenged by exhaustion: this is a story nuanced by each individual’s higher-education experience yet bound by a collective journey to grow up.