St. Mary’s College of Maryland became the latest and most generous entrant in a widening list of colleges reaching out to hundreds of Howard University students left scrambling after an abrupt mass disenrollment last month, offering a $1,000 transition credit and a waived application fee to affected students just weeks before fall classes begin.
The college’s Friday announcement follows Howard’s July 22 notice informing 502 incoming first-year students that they had been disenrolled from the fall 2026 semester, which begins Aug. 17, after their accounts did not reflect required tuition payments or financial documentation by prior deadlines. Howard has said it sent repeated notifications about payment requirements between March and July, including reminders ahead of a July 10 deadline, but many affected students and families told reporters they either never received clear notice or were caught by timing gaps between when financial aid posted and when their balances were finalized.
A Change.org petition organized by one affected student drew more than 4,500 signatures within days, and Howard Interim President Wayne A. I. Frederick told Inside Higher Ed this week that after reviewing all 502 cases, the university has reinstated more than 200 students who either demonstrated they had met their payment commitments or produced documentation of outside scholarships that hadn’t yet posted to their accounts.
That leaves roughly 300 students without a fall semester plan, and a growing number of other institutions have moved to capture them. The University of the District of Columbia was first to invite the affected students to apply. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul followed by directing the State University of New York and City University of New York systems to expedite applications from displaced students who are New York residents and offer an $800 credit to offset the nonrefundable deposit they had already paid Howard. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced a similar effort Thursday, directing the Maryland Higher Education Commission and the University System of Maryland to build a coordinated late-admissions process across the system’s more than dozen public campuses, with participating students likewise receiving an $800 credit toward their nonrefundable Howard deposit.
St. Mary’s College, as Maryland’s separately chartered public honors college, sits outside the University System of Maryland and made its own announcement Friday, going a step further than the state system’s offer by waiving its application fee entirely and raising the credit to $1,000. “Our priority is helping students stay on track toward earning their degree,” said David Hautanen Jr., the college’s vice president for enrollment management. “We recognize that unexpected circumstances can create uncertainty, and we’re committed to helping students continue their education with as little disruption as possible.”
Students interested in the offer are encouraged to contact St. Mary’s College’s Office of Admission to discuss their individual circumstances, either by phone at 240-895-5000, by email at jgrogers@smcm.edu, or through a dedicated webpage the college has set up at smcm.edu/HUpathforward.
It remains unclear how many of the affected students will ultimately take any of the schools up on their offers, or how far the reach of these programs will extend. Moore’s office referred questions about funding for Maryland’s $800 credit to the Maryland Higher Education Commission, which said in a statement Friday that it is “moving swiftly to execute the Governor’s mandate” and that further guidance on eligibility and the financial credit would follow once its assessment is complete.
The episode has drawn broader scrutiny to Howard’s enrollment and financial aid processes. Frederick acknowledged in a CNN interview that this year’s disenrollment wave was “not unusual” in scale but that the university “hadn’t been as strict” about enforcing payment deadlines in past years, and he outlined planned changes to make future tuition communications clearer, including requiring students to pay at least 50% of their balance to hold a spot and providing concrete numerical examples of what that means. Howard, one of roughly 100 historically Black colleges and universities nationally, enrolled about 11,000 undergraduates last fall, with average annual costs of roughly $38,000 in tuition and $13,600 in housing for students living on campus.
For St. Mary’s College, the outreach represents an unusual moment of national visibility for the small public honors college in St. Mary’s City, which enrolled roughly 1,600 undergraduates as of last fall. Whether the offer draws meaningful numbers of displaced Howard students to Southern Maryland this fall remains to be seen, but the college’s entry into what has become a bidding war of sorts among states and institutions underscores how quickly a single university’s enrollment misstep rippled into a multistate scramble for affected students with the fall semester bearing down.
