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Glynn, Amy, Carlo Salerno, and Chris Chumley. Student Financial Success: A Surprising Path to Fix the College Completion Crisis. Chandler, AZ: CampusLogic, 2021. ISBN: 9781737669104.
There is no doubt that there is a college completion crisis. One of the main complaints of current critics of the higher ed industry is that college students spend way too much money pursuing the dream of higher education. Yet many students don’t complete their degree, leaving them saddled with enormous debt with little to show for it. When this book was written, 20% of students enrolled in a four-year institutions -did not complete within six years. For two year institutions, the percentage was much higher at 42%. The most recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
give slightly different percentages, but the story is the same. According to the NSCRC, across all sectors of the industry, only 62.2% of college students complete their degree within six years. And only 42.2% of community college students complete their degree within the same period of time. Alarmingly, these numbers have stalled in the last several years. We simply aren’t moving the needle when it comes to college completion. Regardless of what sector of higher ed you’re in, this is not a good look for an industry that is receiving more negative press all the time.
The Authors
The authors of Student Financial Success all work for CampusLogic, a subsidiary of Ellucian that sells financial aid software and services. Their book is a snapshot of the various ways that current financial aid practices often hinder college completion and how new methods can help improve the completion rate for various types of institutions. Regardless of how you feel about Ellucian or even the quality of CampusLogic’s products, this book highlights an important dimension of the college completion problem.
Review of Contents
The book is divided into three parts.
Part I
Part 1 surveys the problems in the field of financial aid that have created the present crisis in college completion. According to the authors, the linchpin in this crisis is “financial friction,” defined by them as “any point of confusion or frustration encountered by a student on their funding journey” (p. 16). The result of unresolved financial friction is student debt with no degree, a circumstance that lays a heavy burden on students, IHEs, the national economy, and even the quality of life in society.
Although financial aid offices are supposed to prevent this sort of result, the authors assert that many of the structures and processes in those offices actually exacerbate the problem rather than remediate it. According to a Gallup Poll, 40% of college graduates within the past ten years considered dropping out because of financial pressures. And the typical financial aid process seems labyrinthine and esoteric for high school and college students. These processes include 529 plans, FAFSA forms, verification processes, expected family contribution, adjusted gross income, and many others that students and their families find hard to navigate.
The authors observe that the system currently in place on many campuses does little to convince some types of students that they should and actually can stay in school. Despite recent government efforts to simplify the FAFSA, it remains an arcane and even opaque process for students. Financial verification, originally intended to foster accountability for financial aid-seekers, has only raised the barriers higher for certain classes of students. The net result is that financial concerns are the number one reason students opt not to go college, even among students who actually could afford to if they only tried.
Part II
In Part II of the book, the authors construct a solution to the problems outlined in Part 1. That solution begins with a thorough modernization of the financial aid process, including badly needed technological automation in the back end of financial aid offices and an unrelenting customer-first focus on the front end. Aid offices need to eliminate unnecessary complexity for students seeking to navigate the process. They also need to take a student-first approach that treats each student as an individual with specialized needs, charting a financial aid path that takes advantage of every scholarship opportunity and not only those the student asks about. And these pathway plans must show prospective students how they will get financially to graduation and not merely matriculation.
In Chapters 2 through 5, the authors introduce the fictitious students Hannah, Isabella, and Dave, to exemplify how typical financial aid processes can present barriers to students of all backgrounds. Hannah is the typical “Zoomer” 18-year-old student from a middle class background. Isabella is a first-generation college student whose family has doubts about their ability to help her through college. And Dave is a millennial, non-traditional student who is trying college for a second time after spending time in the workforce. All three students face financial barriers in paying for college. But those problems are very different because the students’ backgrounds and personal needs are so varied. The authors’ model, which they call Student Financial Success (SFS), will smooth the pathway for all three students and resolve their problems before they reach a critical level.
Part III
In Part III, the book outlines concrete ways that financial aid offices can overcome the problems outlined in Part I by putting the SFS method into practice. The authors emphasize the need to jettison outmoded, manual processes that unnecessarily eat up time that could be spent providing better service to students. They also outline specific strategies for financial aid officers to ensure that they exploit every possible aid possibility for each student, such as subscribing to scholarship matching services. And to help students persist, the authors say that aid officers need to move from being “scorekeepers” to “coaches” or even “concierges” as they customize a financial pathway that will help a larger number of students persist to graduation.
Evaluation
Student Financial Success is obviously written to support the software and consulting products offered by its publisher, CampusLogic. There are considerable thematic parallels to the themes in this book and the themes on their employer’s website. Nevertheless, this book points out genuine problems that we find on many college and university campuses of all sizes.
Implementation On Smaller Campuses
Smaller campuses, with only a few financial aid officers, must still tread through the mountains of paperwork to help students navigate the complex aid process. With smaller budgets, they may have been unable to modernize their services in the way suggested by CampusLogic. The book actually addresses this issue in Ch. 4, where the authors point out that the cost of not automating these processes will be much higher in terms of lost students than the cost of modernizing. Small campuses should take note. A commitment to improve a campus’s recruitment and retention of students through better financial aid processes is as good a reason for going into debt as there is–particularly if finances are the number one reason so many students fail to enroll at that campus.
Implementation on Larger Campuses
But even for larger institutions, the advice given by this book highlights important challenges and suggests helpful solutions. With larger budgets and heftier staffs, financial aid offices at large campuses can afford these types of modernizations. But large schools will undertake them only when it becomes plain to them that their traditional pipelines of students are beginning to dry up. For that reason, they must pivot to a student-first stance rather than the institution-first position that may have been their default approach for so long. Otherwise, students who otherwise would have enrolled at Big Old University will walk away and take their business to another school where they are more than a number.
Challenges of the “Concierge” Approach
Some of the suggestions for students to increase their chances of paying for college, such as crowdsourcing (p. 113), are impractical for large-scale implementation. Further, asking financial aid officers to be experts at the minutiae of financial regulations and procedures while also being “concierges” shaping customized pathways for each student (p. 223) puts them under severe pressure. Another possibility is an “ombudsman” approach, in which someone (more likely an admissions staff person than a financial aid officer) shepherds the incoming student through the entire admissions process, including financial aid, in a manner that makes the admissions person come across as the student’s advocate and protector.
On smaller campuses, athletic coaches often play this role, going out of their way to help remove any barrier to a prospective student’s enrollment. The key reason coaches work this way is that they are fully accountable for recruiting their rosters, and if they fail to recruit their numbers, their job is in jeopardy. While this sort of accountability is also often found in admissions offices, it is less prevalent in financial aid operations.
Regardless of who plays the ombudsman role, all of the offices involved (admissions, financial aid, student housing, Registrar, academic advising) all need to be tightly coordinated in their goals and methods. Sadly, this level of absolute coordination is much easier spoken about than accomplished.
Recommendation
Much of the data from the book is now a few years old. But the problems cited by this work have only become more acute. Higher ed professionals who are concerned about recruiting and retaining students (and whom does that not include?) will find the suggestions in this book helpful, regardless of whether they use CampusLogic’s products and services. I therefore recommend Student Financial Success as important although not essential reading for financial aid officers.
4 stars out of 5 ★★★★✩