Financial aid technology: More productivity, less drudgery


Financial aid offices struggled through sequestration talks in Washington.

Changes to college students’ financial aid packages caused by the political saber rattling of Congress’s sequestration talks last spring were updated almost in real time, an impossibility in campus financial aid offices of yesteryear.

Colleges and universities in February and March scrambled to let current and incoming students know that the aid available for their college education was in flux, subject to the whims of legislators who couldn’t come to an agreement on how to best solve the nation’s budget deficit.

Tara O’Neill, Marquette University’s associate director of the Office of Finance and Student Financial Aid, said if this sort of political crisis had threatened to alter financial aid awards already doled out to students in need of college funding in the mid-2000s, schools wouldn’t be able to make the proper adjustments and send updated information for days after changes tool effect – weeks, even.

With technological advancements in the financial aid office, however, Marquette officials were able to notify students of possible aid changes within 30 minutes of getting word from the federal government.

“It’s critically important for students to know how much they’re going to owe for the fall semester because, frequently, they still owe money [after the aid is deducted from their tuition,” she said. “Financial aid is always dynamic and always changing. We need to know what’s accurate, and students need to know what’s accurate.”

Marquette’s financial aid office used Peoplesoft’s Campus Solutions Student Financing system, which provided a patch for the updating of student financial aid packages during the days leading up to the start of sequestration.

The system provides constant updates to federal rules and regulations surrounding financial aid, tracks academic enrollment changes, defines the boundaries of a school’s aid awarding cycle to process up to three financial aid years simultaneously, and allows financial aid officers to track loan processing, even when they’re dealing with third party lenders and loan servicers.

It’s just one system that has helped financial aid offices comply with ever-changing federal rules while keeping students up to date on how much financial aid they’ll receive in a time when more students than ever require aid to obtain a secondary education.

Transylvania University has seen a 35 percent increase in student enrollment since changing to Ellucian Recruiter, which helped prospective students complete their admissions applications faster and offered access to financial aid information in a more streamlined way.

Using a system that lets students more easily access financial aid information, Transylvania officials said, is a must when dealing with incoming students.

“Our prospects live in an age of instant gratification,” said Bryan Conover, assistant director of admissions at Transylvania University. “Other institutions were responding quicker. Now, we can meet students’ expectations for responsiveness and this helps us be more competitive.”

O’Neill said in the Stone Ages of financial aid technology – just a decade ago – many requested changes to aid processing would take almost a year to update.

“You were left being noncompliant or having to find a very manual way to become compliant while you waited for changes to be made,” she said, adding that financial aid officials would have to go file by file, making changes to aid data, since the technology wouldn’t be updated for months.

It’s not just the government’s constantly moving target of financial aid regulations that requires updating on the part of aid officials on campuses large and small. Students, and their fluctuating decisions about how much financial help they’ll need to attend college and what sort of course load they’ll take in the coming semester, used to make for a lot of busy work in aid offices.

Even a simple change in a student’s financial aid paperwork would require hours of work correcting various fields of a financial aid form.

“[Technology] makes the packages more accurate and less prone to error,” O’Neill said. “Students change their mind all the time, and instead of using populated fields, you can get live data so what you’re doing is what you intended to do from the get-go.”

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