Bill Berg

Financial aid offices experience very tangible benefits from automated award packaging. Staff members spend less time manually calculating and entering award amounts and have more time to spend counseling students. Improving students’ (and parents’) understanding of their financial aid packages improves their ability to make informed decisions about college. There is also the benefit to the financial aid operation of reducing the errors that inevitably result from manual processes. These are significant tactical improvements in a critical enrollment function. In addition, many institutions use auto-packaging as a test exercise to estimate the impact of changes in awarding policies on the aid budget, or to understand potential losses in…Read more

We’ve taken to thinking of college admissions as less like a funnel and more like a stream, as students enter the admissions process at various points in the flow and the admissions staff is simultaneously communicating with prospective freshmen, transfers, athletes, musicians, sophomores, juniors, seniors, parents, etc. To manage this increasing complexity, consider giving responsibility for one of these “micro-streams” to each recruiter, just as you would assign them geographic territories for recruitment. Then, for each micro-stream: Use several years of data to set a target for the coming year. Create a mini-recruitment plan, complete with timelines and action steps. Identify the funding and resources necessary to achieve th…Read more

We recently encountered an auxiliary service that decided in May to charge a room deposit of $750 for new and returning students. Rather than incorporate it into the student billing system, they simply mailed out their own bills. Students and parents were aggravated, wondering why they were getting a separate bill and why the amount was so high. Another institution reported that they routinely sent bills with the wrong tuition to students enrolling in one particular program because the registrar wanted to be sure the students were really coming before correcting the tuition charge. The correction (as much as $8,000 higher) left the financial aid office scrambling to adjust aid awards. Similarly, sending out bills without informing financial…Read more