When I became President of CampusLogic, Inc., I was committed to leading this Company with the same guiding principles the founder represented when he started the company in 2001.

• Metrics matter – “What gets measured get managed”
• Offer cost effective financial aid solutions
• Increase process accuracy and reduce turnaround times

Ten years later, a lot has changed at CampusLogic. We have served hundreds of clients nationwide. We have grown in size, products and services offered within the management of financial aid operations. However, our commitment to our guiding principles has not changed and serves as our foundation for the next ten years.

As you might imagine our success is dependent on our people. They are an integral part of our Company’s culture and they share in our vision, mission and values. We believe in leveraging the abilities of our employees and investing in them through training and attending industry conferences.

During this time of greater regulatory scrutiny on colleges and universities, and economic turmoil causing higher default rates, CampusLogic continues to provide inventive and effective financial aid solutions for our clients. Our solutions are delivered through flexible delivery methods that include staffing, consulting, outsourcing and our soon to be released online tools.

As part of your regular visits to our website, I hope you will gain a better insight into our products and services. CampusLogic strives to provide our clients with valuable information through our news, presentations and resources. You can follow us on LinkedIn through our Best Practices Financial Aid group, Facebook and Twitter.

Sincerely,
Chris Creaney, President and COO

 1. Develop and Retain Great People

• Invest in finding people who want to learn, care about quality, have a history of solving problems, and care about financial aid compliance
• Conduct ongoing training to ensure financial aid verification process understanding and regulatory awareness
• Consider using an outside financial aid consultant to analyze and redesign processes as well as perform a staffing assessment and conduct training
• Build and follow communication protocol and implement controls to ensure your departments are working together across the verification process
• Consider outsourcing financial aid verification to a third party to allow your staff to focus on other aspects of the financial aid process

 2. Monitor and Communicate Regulatory Changes

• Dedicate resources to continually review financial aid verification regulations and regularly revise and communicate internal policies and procedures
• Participate in peer reviews and industry groups to share best practices for the student financial aid verification process
• Utilize a financial aid consultant to perform a file review to ensure compliance with Title IV financial aid regulations and FAFSA verification requirements

 3. Automate the Verification Process

• Ensure that your student information system is adequately configured and optimized to ensure compliance and process efficiency
• Use an outside financial aid consultant to review your system configuration as well ensure consistency between your processes and your technology
• Implement verification automation tools like StudentVerification.com to reduce human error and improve student satisfaction

By focusing on developing people, monitoring regulatory changes and using technology to manage and control the process, schools can lower their financial aid verification compliance risk and improve student satisfaction.

Tip #5

Strategy to action- create a comprehensive default management plan

Now that you understand the key elements required to manage your school’s CDR, you must put that knowledge to work. Create a default management plan to include staff from departments across the school, such as the registrar’s office, bursar’s office, admissions office, enrollment management office, career placement office, and other faculty. Your plan should:

• Incorporate all student borrower groups, in school, in grace, in repayment, and in delinquency
• Take advantage of industry tools that are provided by school partners and the Department of Education
• Ensure relevance and accountability throughout the school and include measurable goals
• Create 3 or 6 month measurable strategies for each student borrower group whether through email, text, social media, or call campaigns

Tip #4

 Advocate for your students- counsel on over-borrowing

Most colleges and universities counsel their students about amounts they are awarded at their school. However, students are not always counseled about the total amount they have borrowed overall (including prior schools). Many students choose to borrow in excess of the amount they actually need, or choose to wait to make payments toward their education until they are out of school. Counseling students to borrow only to their institutional cost vs. their total cost of attendance is one way to lessen their financial burden. Additionally, students that make cash payments to the school monthly, or toward their loans while in school, are much more likely to continue paying their debts once they are out of school. Utilizing the former of the two, schools can also ensure they meet the regulatory 90/10 rule. Helping your students understand the consequences of over-borrowing is critical to lowering your CDR. Keep in mind:

• Providing total borrowed funding overviews can ensure your students see the big picture
• Higher outstanding loan balances can overwhelm borrowers and will increase the minimum monthly payment required
• Making monthly payments while in school teaches students about financial responsibilities and forms a healthy financial habit that will continue once they are out of school

Check back tomorrow for Tip #5

Stay on top of it- constant student contact

Low CDR rate schools tribute much of their success to constant student contact with their student borrowers while in school and following separation. Schools have numerous resources to updated student demographic, email or phone changes whether through lender, servicer or NSLDS updates. Other resources include social media, or alumni associations. Student must be kept aware of their repayment obligations, along with other options, when students are unable to make payments. Provide online tools for students to:

• Maintain easy access to  deferments or forbearances forms
• Request assistance with new repayment arrangements
• Access a library of servicer contacts and instructions on how to access NSLDS
• Easily update student demographic information

 Check back tomorrow for Tip #4

Tip #2

Measure, analyze, and control- know your student population

Do not wait until formal CDR reports are published! Ongoing monitoring and analysis of your school’s borrower population, based on CDR years, is critical to positively impact your rates and minimize risk.

• Understand your schools student population by analyzing prior cohort default data
• Identify student borrowers that are at higher risk of default whether based on program of study, non-completion of degree program, amount borrowed, etc.
• Implement processes and controls to increase student contact, financial education, and awareness of their outstanding debt
• Ensure ongoing data integrity through servicer, guarantor, and NSLDS reporting

It is not enough to simply review your CDR when required, you must constantly monitor your population, assess risk and strategy, and implement process controls to reduce issues and duplicate desired results.

Check back tomorrow for Tip #3

 Tip #1

 Arm your students with information- financial literacy

Providing essential financial literacy tools and courses is the number one key to arming your students with the facts about student loans and repayment obligations. Field research indicates that most college students do not know the types, amounts, interest rates, or the repayment requirements of their borrowed funding. Based on this study, it is not surprising that students will falter on their responsibilities due to lack of education around their loans. Most colleges and universities are adopting various methods to provide students with loan definitions, repayment responsibilities, and delinquency and default consequences. Some methods you may want to consider for your school include:

• Additional mandatory first-time college student orientation including possible curriculum or online education modules
• Online surveys, questionnaires, webinars, and presentations
• Utilizing third party loan counseling companies, such as CampusLogic, to act as a liaison between the school, student, and lending systems

 Check back tomorrow for Tip #2

1. Focus on core competency: educating students. As financial aid offices are inundated with FA applications, schools find that their staff must spend a majority of their time sifting through paperwork, entering data, and resolving incomplete or discrepant information. All of these tasks are required to reach the end goal of awarding students; however, focusing on these tasks can negatively impact student service. Outsourcing your financial aid functions enables staff to focus on providing stellar student service, while the administrative tasks are completed behind the scenes, thus enhancing the overall student experience.
2. Cost, quality, and timeliness. An increase in financial aid requests requires an increase in resources to process the requests. Unfortunately, the financial aid industry is not an easy industry to learn. The level of effort required to train staff to process financial aid timely, efficiently, and accurately is immense. If your school is not prepared for the increase in FA applications, you will find yourselves unable to catch up in peak seasons. CampusLogic’s outsourcing operations are prepared with staff that can shift to priority projects to ensure awards are processed timely. All of CampusLogic’s resources are continuously trained, year round, and reviewed for quality to ensure students are awarded correctly, every time.
3. Reduction in overhead. Increased applications require an increase in staff, which in turn creates the need for additional office space. Many schools do not have the ability to expand at their current location, or recognize the expense to expand is far too great. Outsourcing this function resolves the need for additional space. CampusLogic’s financial aid operations center is equipped to scale for large staffing contracts, with seasonal resource flexibility and multi-shift staffing options.
4. Risk management- quality and compliance. The Department of Education continues to implement increasingly stringent regulations. While financial aid staff is focused on processing applications and providing student service, regulatory research, review, and implementation tend to take a back seat. Outsourcing your regulatory functions will ensure continuous compliance, updates to policies, and quality analysis to prepare for financial aid audits.
5. Technological advances. As a financial aid outsourcing provider, CampusLogic is always working to ensure that you are provided with the highest level of service at the lowest cost. This requires continuous technology review, system expertise, integration abilities, and process automation. It is difficult, if not impossible, for schools to focus on building, testing, and implementing technology while ensuring exceptional student service with little to no downtime. CampusLogic has dedicated technology staff working around the clock to implement automated solutions built to increase productivity and reduce cost.

As higher education continues to rise in popularity, the need for effective and efficient financial aid management will grow. For schools with limited resources focused on optimizing the financial aid department, outsourcing may offer solutions and strategies previously out of reach. Outsourcing can provide strong financial aid services focused on operational success throughout the department.

CampusLogic’s outsourcing services help colleges and universities achieve their goals by providing complete financial aid office outsourcing solutions. Through staffing and consulting resources, CampusLogic can assist schools in developing complete financial aid department operational efficiency. Contact CampusLogic immediately by calling (877) 259-9137 to learn more about our financial aid solutions.

While the needs of different institutions will vary, some metrics should be used, reported on, and monitored on an annual, monthly, weekly, or even daily basis in all financial aid offices.

There are four standard questions to consider when developing metrics:

What functions and activities should be measured?

Who completed the functions or various activities?

When were the functions and activities started and completed?

How were the functions completed (meaning were they accurate)?

Each metric should be measured with the following guiding principles in mind:

Timeliness- the number of days from the start to the end of a transaction or activity

Quality- the number of transactions or activities processed accurately divided by the total number of transactions or activities processed

Cost- The number of transactions or activities processed divided by the total labor cost of all staff involved in the transaction or activity

Productivity- The number of transactions or activities processed divided by the number of staff involved in the transaction or activity

Once you have answered the question of what transactions to measure by following the four guiding principles, the key to effectively using the metrics is to make them a part of everyday operations.

The ongoing utilization of metrics consists of three steps: Measure, Analyze, and Control.

Measure results by establishing a baseline and monitoring ongoing performance

Analyze results to identify trends and determine opportunities for improvement

Control results by implementing a control plan and providing continuous measurement

Schools cannot effectively determine the impact of staff, process, or technology changes without first understanding how their current operation is performing. Effective metrics help to establish performance baselines and subsequently measure changes to people, process, and technology against those baselines. Establishing and maintaining a series of metrics in a financial aid office can be challenging at first, but the information each metric provides is invaluable and necessary to efficiently operate a financial aid department.

CampusLogic provides staffing, consulting, and outsourcing solutions tailored to meet the specific needs of your financial aid office. If your institution struggles to accurately measure and track important data, or you wish to manage your institutions financial aid metrics more efficiently, contact CampusLogic immediately by calling (877) 259-9137 to learn more about our financial aid management solutions.

To obtain a copy of our full White Paper titled Financial Aid Department Metrics, What Gets Measured Gets Managed, e-mail Melissa.Cyr@CampusLogic.com.

These CDR reports are used as a measure of how well a school prepares its students for loan repayment. High default rates suggest that the school has not accurately counseled students regarding borrowing, repayment obligations or the consequences of defaulting on a loan.

Before reviewing this year’s CDR reports, here are five facts you should know:

• A default occurs after 270 days of non-payment. However, defaulted loans are typically not counted in an institutions cohort default rate until they are at least 360 days overdue.

•  Institutions with high cohort default rates can face penalties, including a loss of eligibility for federal student aid programs.

•  Default rates are expected to be significantly higher (as much as 93%) when measured over three years vs. over two years.

•  Beginning in 2012, a school with a single year CDR of 30 percent or higher will be required to establish a default prevention task force to address the high default rates.

•  Following the release of the unofficial CDR reports a school has 45 days to review and challenge the accuracy of the report if necessary. If any of the information on the report is incorrect a school may appeal the report with the Department of Education.

Preliminary analysis of the new CDR reports show that default rates will increase significantly across all types of institutions. Affected by the poor economy, many borrowers are struggling to repay their loans. Unfortunately, the schools are also feeling the consequences of these defaults, as their eligibility to receive federal aid funding is in jeopardy. Without access to federal grant and loan funds to assist students with the costs of receiving a higher education, the school’s survival is in question.

CampusLogic offers an automated solution for complete and accurate reconciliation of Cohort Default Rate reports. Utilizing a proven strategy combined with proprietary technology, CampusLogic is able to quickly identify discrepancies with reliable results. If your institution is faced with an increased cohort default rate or you wish to manage your default rates more effectively, contact CampusLogic immediately by calling (877) 259-9137 to learn more about their default management solutions.

CampusLogic administers a LinkedIn group called Financial Aid Best Practices, which exchanges ideas about the tools, technology and techniques being deployed in the higher education industry to achieve operational excellence in financial aid related processes.

Current members come from a variety of areas in the higher education industry including schools, financial aid software providers, enrollment services companies, financial literacy companies, federal loan servicer, and many more.

Member benefits include:

• Exchange of diverse insight and ideas
• Joining like-minded professionals
• Financial aid and regulatory solutions

LinkedIn account holders can become a member of the Financial Aid Best Practices group which allows you to contribute and participate in featured discussions within LinkedIn. Click the link below if you are interested in joining Financial Aid Best Practices group:

Once the membership is requested through LinkedIn, a thank you email will be sent for your interest in joining our LinkedIn group. CampusLogic reviews each and every applicant for verification that they are in, or directly related to, the education industry. We will review your request within 2-3 business days.