Financial aid is tough work. Staff members deal with families on one of their most delicate topics. They see people making mistakes on their taxes, working through the fallout of divorces, and struggling to make their children’s hopes come true. The regulatory changes seem never-ending, while a lack of financial education and increased resentment about college costs put constant pressure on every staff member’s customer-service abilities.
All of that is a big ask, especially for those in this field’s many modestly paid positions. Big enough to put its future in question. Here are three perspectives on the state of the financial-aid profession, followed by three practical solutions.
“It’s no wonder there is a high rate of turnover.” Marilae spent 10 years in the profession, moving from student employee to the director of a financial-aid office. She learned the ropes “a little at a time,” since training is rarely afforded to newcomers in the profession. Her take:
- “The regulations are daunting. The annual audit is always looming large over your shoulder. Recruiting is foreign. Supervising and training a staff can be exhausting. Collaborating with the other campus offices that touch financial aid is a challenge when you realize how little the administration knows about what you really do. You fit all this into a 50-hour work week and hope you are fairly compensated — all the while knowing you most likely could get a job making considerably more elsewhere. It’s no wonder there is a high rate of turnover.”
- Yet there are plenty of positives to the work: “On the flip side, it has been rewarding to mentor, teach, and train student employees (and admissions staff) who want to learn about the work of financial aid and serve students. Admissions staff trained to walk prospective students through the maze of financial-aid requirements help build a strong team that serves families and students better while taking the strain of time off the financial-aid staff is a win/win situation. Student employees who decide higher education is their life calling and spend time in financial aid is another positive outcome.”
“Much of the work I do is helping to rescue financial-aid offices that have gotten off track because they don’t have the experience or the training they need.” Jen worked in campus financial-aid offices for 15 years before becoming a consultant. Financial-aid offices, she notes, have seen significant changes in the past decade:
- “About 12 years ago, the Department of Education introduced Return of Title IV funds (or R2T4 — requirements that govern, as Nacubo puts it, “the return of ‘unearned’ federal student aid” dollars when a student withdraws before completing a term.) Financial aid has evolved from a processing department to a customer-service-focused department, requiring a different set of skills and a much faster pace. Most offices were not given additional staff resources to handle the R2T4 change. Instead, the shift made them much more reliant on other offices on campus, over which financial aid has no control.”
- “Many campuses have a very poor process for effectively working with student withdraws, drops, and last date of attendance. This creates a huge amount of stress on the financial-aid office, and as a profession in recent years, we’ve seen a lot of talent in the financial-aid pool leave the job to retire or move to the public sector. We weren’t prepared to lose all of that knowledge at once, and now we are very much seeing a gap in training and processing aid. There just isn’t time, staff, and knowledge. … Much of the work I do is helping to rescue financial-aid offices that have gotten off track because they don’t have the experience or the training they need.”
“The overall staff shortage is masking a longer trend in financial aid that began well before the pandemic.” Aaron, an associate vice president of enrollment, has conducted director-level searches in financial aid at two different institutions, yet has “never had more than two really qualified applicants” in each search. The same has been true of searches to fill midlevel positions. He notes:
- “In more than a dozen years as a chief enrollment officer, my hardest hires have always been in the financial-aid office. Finding people with the right combination of regulatory knowledge, technology know-how, and people skills — and keeping them — has at times seemed like a Herculean task. The concerning thing for an enrollment manager is that I don’t see the situation getting any better. In fact, I expect it to get worse without some serious changes.”
- “Either the financial-aid system will need to be significantly simplified, or the financial-aid function will need to be better integrated within the rest of the university to spread the responsibility and the workload. Otherwise, I foresee higher education being unable to produce or train enough specialists to fulfill the demand.”
What happens next? Most of us in higher education can’t do much to directly influence whether the federal government streamlines financial-aid regulations. But we can take steps to build up the financial-aid profession on our campuses. Here are three strategies that any institution could employ right away:
Strategy 1: Grow your own. It is common knowledge that admissions offices are often populated by recent graduates and former student ambassadors. Much like Marilae, many successful financial-aid professionals began as work-study students in the financial-aid office. At first, those jobs mostly involve low-level administrative duties, like filing. But student workers who persist in these roles are often exposed to much higher-level tasks and develop a working knowledge of the financial-aid system. They become a true part of the team and great candidates for entry-level, full-time positions on the campus.
Why don’t we hear about the career pathway in financial aid — as we do with its counterpart in admissions?
Students giving campus tours are far more visible to the public than those holding work-study positions in financial aid, but the other factor is that there are far fewer work-study jobs in the latter. That is a missed opportunity. By simply increasing the number of student positions in financial aid, and being more intentional about training them, we could begin to make an impact on the staffing shortage. If each college committed to hiring a few more work-study students in financial aid, and each office was intentional about exposing them to the various aspects of the profession, we could build a solid pipeline.
Strategy 2: Treat admissions and financial aid as a tag team. For years, those two offices have been joined at the hip but rarely integrated. What if we could change that and give staff members more potential career paths?
Some colleges already take a more holistic approach on this front and hire “enrollment counselors.” These counselors are admissions-focused but also well trained in financial aid, and handle almost all of the financial-aid needs of new students. That allows other financial-aid counselors to focus on the needs of returning students.
If that system were adopted by more institutions, it could be further developed to allow staff members to move more easily between the two areas. The idea would be to groom a new type of midlevel professional who would also know the admissions cycle.
So, for instance, after a few years of training and work in the hybrid role of enrollment counselor, staff members could be given a choice of whether they want to focus their career on admissions or financial aid. Many admissions staff tire of the travel after a few years and feel like their personal lives are no longer a match for the itinerant nature of the work. In the tag-team model, we could offer them the option of working in financial aid, with its more stable schedule.
Strategy 3: Bring in the tech support. We’ve already noted that the role of financial aid, and the required skill sets, have changed rapidly in a decade. One of the biggest needs we see is for increased technical know-how. The financial-aid process has become too complex and cumbersome to be managed as traditional customer service.
Offices must modernize their systems and their technology to allow students to self-serve in answering more of their own financial-aid questions and getting the information they need. That is what families want, and it is the best way to help us manage the volume — but it requires more investment in systems.
Recruiting more systems expertise into your financial-aid office can make a huge difference. We need to have talented people on the team who know financial aid, know programming languages like SQL, and know how to get technology systems to interface with one another. We need people who can solve a problem and learn while doing. When regulations change, and there is no guidebook, good systems thinkers can help set up processes to bridge the gap.
Of course, systems thinkers are in demand in most professions, so hiring them in financial aid will require competitive salaries. But thinking of the financial-aid office as a good home for systems thinkers could expand the applicant pool and bring modernization to our practices. Changing the way we structure and market financial-aid positions — and changing the work itself — could make the profession more attractive to new graduates who, while they have strong technical skills, still want to work in a people-focused organization. Imagine financial aid for a new generation, and work to make it a place where technical problem solvers feel welcomed and rewarded.
Across higher education, it’s going to be a challenge to recruit financial-aid officers for the next few years. We need to understand and appreciate the work they do and the responsibility they carry. Our institutions literally could not run without them. Now is the time to plant the seeds that will lead to a healthy financial-aid profession, with a deep pool of trained experts. With these three easy steps, we could start to relieve the pressure on this field right now.
