A vigilant employee at Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona, noticed similar handwriting on several financial aid applications. She alerted her supervisors, who found other irregularities—such as the same mailing addresses—on a number of applications. The college notified authorities, and when the federal investigators completed their work, participants in a financial aid scheme faced 130 […]
The Department of Education in 2015 announced the move to an earlier FAFSA filing date using prior-prior year guidelines. Since then, colleges and universities that receive federal Title IV financial aid have worked tirelessly to assess the potential implications to enrollment and to make the adjustments needed in the first year of implementation. In a […]
Steve Kramer, Vice President, ACI Worldwide I know the pain Finance VPs in higher education experience. It seems like every day that someone comes to you saying “Our students need new technology. Can we squeeze it into the budget?” I own the P&L, so I get it. Did you know that your university payment systems […]
In 2006, Troy University, a four-year public institution in Alabama, was writing thousands of refund checks and financial aid disbursements every semester across multiple campuses in Montgomery, Dothan, Phenix City and online, servicing more than 17,000 students. It was time-consuming, labor-intensive work for Troy staff, and students not only waited in long lines to get […]
The first clue that something was wrong at Tidewater Community College in Virginia emerged in March 2016 when at least 15 employees discovered they could not file their tax returns. After the IRS informed the employees that their returns had already been submitted, college officials realized someone had breached the computer system. The attack began […]
Sometimes it becomes clear very early on that a facilities project—especially a solar initiative—will be complicated. At Endicott College in Massachusetts, administrators looking into solar and other renewable energy technologies discovered several of the rooftops were too small to accommodate solar installation. Planned renovations on other buildings meant solar panels would need to be removed […]
An income-share agreement (ISA) is an alternative to using student loans to finance higher education. Rather than a loan, a student agrees to pay a percentage of their future income for a set number of years back to the investor, which could be a university that funds its own ISA or a pool of investors […]
First-generation college student and recent UC Berkeley grad Ulises Serrano, an aspiring higher ed administrator, will enter graduate school this fall without any student loan debt. That’s thanks in part to the income-share agreement (ISA) used to finance the first two years of his post-secondary education at Allan Hancock College in California. For Serrano and […]
“The last thing colleges want to do is put a former student in collections,” says Harrison Wadsworth, executive director of the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations. But when internal efforts to collect tuition don’t work, it’s important to have somewhere to turn for help. At Texas Tech University, the finance office pursues unpaid balances […]
When Tyson Cooper began working in student accounts 10 years ago, debt collection on college campuses was viewed as purely business and "a necessary evil," says the director of student financial services at the University of Southern Virginia. Today, with increased attention on student success and the long-term effects of unpaid accounts, institutions need to […]
