Parents Buzz

Financial Aid

Changes Aim to Better Meet Students' Needs

By Charles Wilder Puls, Associate Dean and Director of Financial Aid

During 2008, the Financial Aid Office utilized focus groups and surveys to help identify areas where we are succeeding, as well as areas where we have opportunities for improvement. In reviewing the feedback, I was pleased to see many areas where we have implemented changes to meet the needs that students identified. For example:

Appointments: The ability for a student to schedule a time to meet with his/her individual counselor was identified as a critical service, and that process was implemented last June.

Financial Aid Portal: The ability for a student to see information regarding his/her financial aid on-line was also identified as critical, and we are pleased to have launched a new portal in December. Students can see information regarding their application materials and their aid packages. Soon we will add the ability to see what aid has disbursed to the student account.

Hey Dude: Knowing their financial aid counselor was also identified as something students felt should be a key component of our aid program. To paraphrase one student, “couldn’t you just send us a letter that said, ‘Hey dude, I’m your counselor.’” We now do just that (though we use their first name, rather than calling them dude).

While these are a few of the changes we have made, there is always room for further improvement. Student feedback helped identify three key areas where we will continue our focus.

Timeliness: We interpret this to mean not just how quickly we can get the initial financial aid package mailed, but also how quickly we can make adjustments to the package, as well as how quickly we can process aid so that it disburses to the student account. In all three of these areas, we are working to identify improvements we can make. The first one will be the mailing of the 09-10 financial aid letters to upperclass students. Those mailings have historically started in late June for on-time applicants. This year, on-time applicants will see their financial aid packages as early as the last week in May.

Clarity: Here, we interpret clarity to mean every way we communicate with students and families, whether through application materials, our Web site, on the phone, or in person. Over the past year, we made several changes to our Web site to improve the ability of students to contact us with questions and to improve the information available (the revised loan information is one of the most significant changes). In addition to improving our website, we’ll be asking more questions than we have in the past when

Document Handling: When it comes to document handling, our first goal has been to eliminate as many documents as we can. For example, over the past few years, we have eliminated the paper-based process for loans, so that students now complete entrance counseling, promissory notes, and exit counseling online. Over the coming year, we’ll be moving the financial aid application process online, as well. For documents that we can’t eliminate, we are actively working to implement an imaging system that will allow us more efficient access to documents and allow students to more quickly see that we’ve received the documents they submitted.

The core concepts that students raised in both the focus groups and the surveys serve as key conversation items in all of our financial aid staff activities. We hope that you will notice this improvement, as well as offer us continued feedback.