By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

“It is safe to say hardly anybody pays the full sticker price tuition,” said Eric Nemoto, director of financial aid for Chaminade University of Honolulu.

It’s true. It’s pretty hard not to get financial aid when attending to Hawaii’s only Catholic university. Just graduating from a Hawaii high school with decent grades will allow you to chop anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 off your base tuition.

And being a member of a Hawaii Catholic parish or a graduate of a Hawaii Catholic high school could cut your cost in half.

With the annual full-time tuition at $16,140 (actually less than Punahou’s), it’s easy to get a good deal, particularly if you qualify for additional money from any of the dozens of endowed scholarships available.

Nemoto, who is also his school’s associate dean of enrollment management, estimated that more than 95 percent of Chaminade’s students receive financial assistance.

“If you come to Chaminade with a grade point average between 2.25 and 2.49 and did nothing but graduate from a local high school, you get the $3,000 Hawaii grant,” he said.

And it’s all up from there.

A 2.5-2.99 high school GPA will get you a “Leadership Grant” of $5,000. A 3.0-3.49 average qualifies for a “Presidential Scholarship” of $6,500. And a 3.5-4.0 GPA earns you a $7,000 “Regents Scholarship.”

These grants are guaranteed every year for four years, even if your college grades slip below your high school best. If it takes longer to graduate, the school will consider extending it, Nemoto said.

“Our intent is to see them through graduation,” he said.

A visit to the Chaminade website will introduce potential students to an 180-page catalogue of grants and scholarships, about 100 available through the school and about 50 additional “outside” awards.

The “Parish Scholarship,” worth half the tuition price or about $8,000 a year for four years, is awarded to a first-year student from Hawaii with a high school GPA of 3.0 who is nominated by his or her parish priest. Usually, Chaminade only allows one student per parish, but it does make exceptions.

The “Catholic Scholarship” is like the Parish Scholarship except that the applicant is recommended by his or her Catholic high school and nominated by the principal.

The Marianist Leadership Scholarship is for graduates of a Marianist high school, such as Saint Louis, and is worth 75 percent, or $12,000, off the base tuition.

Other institutional grants — essentially discounted tuition — include the Miss Hawaii Scholarship, Science Fair Scholarship, History Day Scholarship, the Archdiocese of Samoa-Apia Scholarship, and the Association for Hawaiian Civic Clubs Scholarship.

More than 60 additional endowed scholarships — additional money made available through the generosity of benefactors — may take even more off the tuition price. Some of these are restricted, which means a student must meet special qualifications, for example, be a resident of Kauai, or be of Portuguese ancestry.

Athletic scholarships are also available.

According to Nemoto, the school offers a generic application for most of these scholarships so that a student can apply for numerous scholarships without having to fill out numerous forms.

Chaminade’s scholarship committee tries to match the right applicant with the right scholarship and to award as many and as much as possible, he said.

Nemoto advises future students not to base their financial outlay by the raw figures on the university website.

Once someone applies for financial aid, “we are pretty sure we can offer a pretty decent package,” he said.

“We have to,” he said, and not only because is it very hard for most students to pay tuition in these hard economic times.

“It’s tough to recruit these days,” he said.

Making tuition affordable, he said, “is the school investing in itself.”