Students Want It, Staff Need It, Colleges Have No Choice; Better Technology Is a Must

Let’s set aside the five minutes it takes you to read this blog to be completely honest with each other. I am concerned about the financial aid offices that support the 20 million students enrolled in college. Staff members are stretched to their breaking points. Colleges have been failing their students through a lack of investment in technology, human capital, and simplification in aid offices. The result is that 40% of low income students accepted  never make it to campus and 3 million more drop out each year due to financial issues. Take note: I did not say that financial aid offices are failing students.  

Financial aid offices are doing all they can within the confines of a highly regulated and under-resourced framework. They are left to cobble together resources like staffing, freemium services, and outdated technology to try to keep schools afloat, but this is not sustainable. 

Along Came COVID-19 

And shining light on all these issues? The COVID-19 crisis. I fear this pandemic is the figurative straw that broke the camel’s back. While financial aid offices have been muddling through using manual, paper-driven processes, COVID-19 has proven that the only way offices can function efficiently, stay connected with their students, and keep processes moving forward is with virtual technology. Now, not only are financial aid teams forced to reflect on how their processes function in-house, they must also determine whether they are prepared for the next emergency that arises. 

More Honesty 

Campuses scrambled to move academic delivery to an online format, but even more difficult than that was the transition of traditional support services like financial aid. Why? Because the elimination of a physical office, phone systems, and fax machines left staff members without access to the lousy tools they were accustomed to using. This left financial aid offices little opportunity other than to simply survive during office closures. I beg administrations to take notice of this. 

The only way to address the enrollment, retention, and graduation issues on campus is to first address the ability of students to be financially successful. I do not know of a single student who can graduate college if he or she cannot pay their bills. Financial aid offices are forced to exist in a world of outdated technology and limited resourcing, but the only way to create the financial aid office of the future is to make smart investments in people, technology, analytics, and automation. To be clear, COVID-19 did not create this problem for schools. Instead, it gave visibility to an already-existing issue that financial aid offices have been dealing with for quite some time. 

Gone are the days where physical lines out the door are an option. We can no longer ask students to print out and fax paperwork. We’ve moved past the point when all advising will happen face-to-face. Students will no longer accept wasteful and impersonal interactions. Financial aid is changing, and offices that keep up with modern needs will be the most successful in retaining and graduating their students. 

The Marist Mindset List points out several facts about the graduating class of 2023. These students were born in 2001, and interestingly enough, they have never shared the earth with Joey Ramone, George Harrison, Timothy McVeigh, or Ken Kesey. But you should also know this about the way they see the world: 

• Thumb, jump, and USB flash drives have always pushed floppy disks further into history.   
• The primary use of a phone has always been to take pictures.  
• They have outlived iTunes.  
• Apple iPods have always been nostalgic.  
• Face recognition technology has always been used at public events. 
• They have grown up with Big Data and ubiquitous algorithms that know what they want before they do.  
• There have always been “smartwatches.”  
• Blackboards have never been dumb. 

 What is my point? Students are digitally engaged in just about every area of their lives, and they have expectations about how, when, and where they can engage with the financial aid office. If you want your office to go from surviving to thriving, you will need to embrace every opportunity to meet your students where they are—and that means meeting their communication needs through technology. 

Your students need to be able to engage with you 24/7/365 from anywhere in the world as if they are on campus. Remember all the technology mentioned above? All those things are part of everyday life for your students. Your students spend their days getting information in mere seconds—when and where they want it. When they interact with the financial aid office, they don’t want to step back in time and learn how to use fax machines, stand in lines just to talk to a person, and be put on hold when they just need the answer to a routine question. It’s time to move document collection, communication, and counseling interactions to a personalized, virtual setting that can streamline the financial aid experience for every student. 

Personalize & Automate 

Think about the way your students shop for goods and experiences today. Big data and algorithms seem to know what they want even before they know. Because of consumer data that is collected and shared, companies can now predict which products and services specific individuals will want to purchase. It’s almost as if big data is teaching them not to think about purchases. 

Now think about the size, nature, and complexity of the purchasing process for higher education. The last thing we want is for students to tune out and not pay attention. Instead, we need to build personalized experiences that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to guide the student financial aid experience—mirroring the automated experiences they are accustomed to in other areas of their lives.  

The CampusLogic Solution 

VirtualAdvisor from CampusLogic delivers the personalized experience your students want, while utilizing an AI-enabled virtual assistant that guides them through friction points throughout the financial aid process. VirtualAdvisor can answer up to 80% of routine questions, personalizing answers for each individual student based off of information received by integrating with your school’s student information system (SIS). This frees up your staff to work one-on-one with students who need advising the most—like at-risk students who are in danger of not being able to complete their higher education because of financial reasons. 

Conversations that begin with VirtualAdvisor can easily be escalated to an in-person advisor because of the product’s unique sentiment analysis capability. When student conversations become complicated, advisors can seamlessly step in to further personalize the experience. Not only does this create greater efficiencies for staff by eliminating rote, manual activities, they are also able to focus more of their energy on high-value interactions. 

COVID-19 taught us that students and staff need to be able to interact anytime and anywhere—and while the pandemic was the first major roadblock that made everyone realize what would happen if they hadn’t automated, it won’t be the last. Systems should have mobile and remote access that spans the SIS, imaging systems, student engagement platforms, and communication systems, which will allow for staff to perform their jobs from any office (even at home) at any time. 

I spoke with a school during the first week of June, and they reported they were still unable to take incoming student calls because they were limited by the traditional phone system which can only be answered on campus. We already know phone calls are a last resort for students, but financial aid offices are stuck with ancient technology. Students don’t want to use it, and it’s inefficient for staff. Other things that simply don’t work anymore? Waiting in long lines, searching for answers, and taking a number. Students expect a new and engaging experience that delivers individualized responses based on their unique needs. With VirtualAdvisor, you can give them all of that. 

Doing more with less just got easier. With an intelligent AI-enabled virtual assistant at your side, you can focus on the real reason you work in financial aid—helping students get the funding they need to complete their higher education. Instead of shuffling papers, faxing, filing, and working your way through endless routine questions, you can focus on providing an exceptional student experience that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime through consumable personalized interactions. With VirtualAdvisor, you can give every student the attention they need and keep them moving in the right direction to complete their higher education goals. 

Financial aid is changing to keep pace with the rest of the world. Institutions that lean into change will be the ones that see more student satisfaction, higher enrollment numbers, and boosted retention. It’s time to step into the future and personalize the financial aid experience—for the good of every student in higher education. 

About the Author

Amy Glynn joined CampusLogic in 2013, focused on helping colleges and universities deliver student financial success through automation, advising, and analytics. Ever-focused on improving staff efficiency and the student experience, Amy has spent more than a decade optimizing the financial aid process while ensuring institutions maintained compliance with Federal Title IV regulations. A sought-after national-stage speaker, Amy champions ideas that can help turn the tide for the nearly 3 million students who drop out of higher education every year for reasons related to finances. Student financial success has become a strategic imperative for all higher education institutions and Amy often lends her voice to policy discussions focused on improving accessibility, driving informed borrowing, and increasing completion. Amy earned her Master of Science in Higher Education from Walden University.

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