“Stop hitting yourself in the hand with that hammer”:
With better tools and processes, overburdened financial aid offices can improve efficiency, recruitment and retention
As institutions grapple with the greatest challenge forced on them by the Covid-19 pandemic —carrying on instruction safely and effectively — a troubling trend has gone largely unnoticed. Experienced financial aid officers are retiring, often years ahead of schedule. And many schools, especially small and rural ones, are struggling to find qualified people who are interested in stepping into the role.
“Being a financial aid director right now is very stressful,” says Brenda Scherer, National Director of Student Financial Aid at professional services firm CliftonLarsonAllen. “The regulations are changing so much. Working from home and trying to interact remotely with students and parents — who themselves are stressed — is a big drain on a lot of people. People who are close to retirement are just retiring. And I have heard of a few financial aid people who have just gotten out of the business.”
But this challenge also presents an opportunity. The people taking on the decision-making roles in financial aid offices can take advantage of myriad tools and services that are designed precisely to help them do more with less.
Jenzabar, which offers a range of intuitive, flexible systems specifically for higher ed, asked experts in the financial aid services industry to share their thoughts on current and near-future trends. They all agreed that while financial aid offices are facing unprecedented challenges, they can not only push through these turbulent times, but come out ahead.
Identify speed bumps and blind spots in your processes
When was the last time you really stepped back and examined how your office works, and why? Even in less unsettled years, the demands of workflow and deadlines can delay serious re-evaluation to the point that “that’s the way we’ve always done it” sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation.
“It's psychology, we cling to what we know,” says David Meredith, a consultant with CampusWorks and Interim Director of Student Financial Services at Pennsylvania Highlands Community College. “It’s like telling someone, ‘If you stop hitting yourself in the hand with that hammer, you'll feel better.’ And they say, ‘I know, but I’ve been doing this for years so I’m kind of used to the pain.’
“I’ve worked with people who have used the same system for 20 or more years, and I try to think about it from their perspective. I understand the human reaction. It’s not necessarily resistance to the new, it’s comfort with the old. That’s going to happen until you can demonstrate that the new process can make their work infinitely easier and more enjoyable. I think tools like Jenzabar Financial Aid have been and will continue to be useful as we identify our hand-hitting processes and say, ‘Geez, can’t they do this for us? More efficiently and with less pain involved?’”
Many financial aid officers may not realize how much the software available to them has improved in recent years, in terms of both reliability and user-friendliness.
“A lot of our clients are doing an assessment of their processes, bringing in somebody from the outside to take a look,” says Scherer of CliftonLarsonAllen. “One of the things we’re finding is a lack of trust with automation. So we try to open their eyes to what the software can do.
“For example, in a lot of the systems now, you can write scripts for how you want to award, say, FSEOG. And it’ll go through the steps and award it based on your script. In prior years, software companies didn’t have that refined, so it might have awarded an FSEOG that wasn't quite right and the staff would have to fix it. But now that they can write those more advanced scripts, they can get FSEOG to automatically award.”
Some products didn’t even exist a few years ago. ProEducation Solutions’ Proverifier+, which retrieves tax data directly from the IRS and automatically verifies the identity of more than half of applicants, was made possible by the 2017 shift to using tax returns from two years prior for the FAFSA.
“One of the biggest pain points for financial aid offices still is federal verification,” says Paul Gilroy, President of ProEd. “It’s a very complicated process that requires lots of professional knowledge and expertise. Verification is sort of a subset of a larger issue, which is resolving data conflicts between documents you get from a student. The problem of verification is that it increases the amount of stuff you get from students and parents, and the likelihood of more data conflicts is higher.”
Not all financial aid offices work the same, or want to. That’s why choosing the right product is important.
“Having a relationship with a software provider, I feel, is paramount to anything else,” says Nicole Boelk, Director of Financial Aid Services at Baker College in Michigan. Baker uses solutions from Jenzabar.
“We expected to have to change our processes to accommodate the product,” Baker says of transitioning to Jenzabar Financial Aid. “That didn’t happen. Instead, we were able to build our processes to work within the software. Due to that flexibility, we got to think about what we wanted to change, and we were able to make the software compatible with the changes we were making. We are able now to successfully process aid to thousands of students.”
Communicate, listen, repeat
Automation and personalization are not mutually exclusive. In fact, Generation Z, which grew up clutching smart phones, prefers communication modes that push information to them but keep the messenger at arm’s length, until they’re ready to engage. “Conversational marketing,” built on texting and chatbot platforms, is quickly becoming a staple of recruitment, and those tools are useful in the financial aid process as well.
“The number one challenge schools are facing is communication with the students,” says Ed Colestock, Product Manager for Jenzabar Financial Aid. “They don’t read emails. You’ve got to communicate with students the way they want, you’ve got to text them. They don’t want to talk on the phone, they want to live chat, they want to direct message, they want to get a push notification, they want to upload the document from their phone.”
Meredith points too to the ability to make the financial aid application process more responsive and transparent to the student.
“Everyone likes to complain about how students expect everything on demand, but that’s the kind of world we live in,” he says. “If you can respond to students in a timely way, and get the ball moving to whatever comes next for them in the process, it keeps them from calling, they’re happier, and staff is more efficient.
“The ‘Amazon-ation’ of customer service is real, and we have to learn how to adapt to that or risk losing customers. And I know that’s a charged term in higher ed, some folks don’t like to think of students as customers. But if they don’t like what your delivering, there are a lot of institutions out there that will deliver it to them. You resist change at your own peril.”
With data, more things are possible
According to the National Student Clearinghouse, the average retention rate (first-year students returning for second year) was 67 percent in 2018. No one knows what effect the pandemic could have on that rate, but observers see trouble ahead.
“College affordability is going to become even more important,” says Gilroy, who’s preparing a presentation on the topic for the 2021 National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators conference. “There is already tuition resistance from students saying, ‘Look, I’m not getting the education you offered me, I’m getting online education.’ There is a lot of pressure to push tuitions down.”
Scherer points out that given the toll the pandemic has taken on the economy, many families will have suffered a steep drop in income compared to 2018, the tax year that new FAFSA applications will be based on.
“The financial aid directors are going to have to go through that professional judgment process, and then go to the student and ask for more information, and it's going to be a lot more work for them,” she says. “And unfortunately, a lot of the college and university budgets out there aren't going allow for additional staff to be hired. It's going to kind of fall on the existing staff.”
The FAFSA and admissions applications provide institutions with a wealth of information that can be used to segment student populations (adult learners, athletes, first-generation students, legacy students, etc.) and provide specific support or communications throughout the enrollment process, including how to secure financial aid offers and the different components within them. Software that can capture data and help design relevant communications around personas and outcomes can equip institutions with the means to achieve enrollment and retention goals.
In many cases, students with highest difference between aid and total cost are the ones that do not return to campus. By identifying which students have the highest unmet needs, institutions can attempt intervention strategies, such as financial aid counseling or incentives that make it more feasible for those students to return.
The institutions that invest in such strategies will increase their chances of not just surviving the next few years, but thriving.
“If I had to boil it down to one thing, it’s uncertainty,” says Meredith. “Our job has to be to help people through that uncertainty. With the right tools and processes, we can do that.”
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