Facing More Regulations, Aid Offices Struggle to Serve Students

By Beckie Supiano

Rob C. Witzel

“It doesn’t matter how many regulations are implemented,” says Mia Mwango, acting director of financial aid at Santa Fe College, in Florida. “If enrollment goes down or funding goes down, our budget goes down.”

Like many campus offices, financial aid is doing more with less. The pattern looks like this: More students are applying for aid, and more aid is being awarded, but aid offices’ operating budgets are flat, according to a report released this year by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, or Nasfaa.

“This survey,” the report says, “reveals the widespread perception that the resource shortages felt by aid administrators are not short-term products of our economy, but rather permanent structural problems without foreseeable reprieve.”

The biggest strain on aid offices, according to the Nasfaa survey, is a “greater compliance workload.” New government regulations are coming down more often than they used to, says Karen McCarthy, a senior policy analyst at the association.

Administrative burden may not be a sexy topic, but it has important implications. Spending more time on compliance means spending less time counseling students — many of whom are borrowing to pay for college and could use help making good decisions. The report includes a list of policy recommendations that Nasfaa believes can help both aid administrators and students.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that financial aid is full of regulations — after all, the billions of dollars provided annually in federal grants, loans, and other aid come from taxpayers. Federal financial aid is also the government’s main point of contact with colleges, and the threat of losing aid eligibility is its biggest penalty. As a result, aid offices at some small colleges are also responsible for making sure that consumer disclosures unrelated to aid — those dealing with fire safety, for instance — are posted on time.

More regulation does not necessarily mean more resources to handle it. “It doesn’t matter how many regulations are implemented,” says Mia Mwango, acting director of financial aid at Santa Fe College, a community college in Gainesville, Fla. “If enrollment goes down or funding goes down, our budget goes down.”

The office’s operating budget fluctuates, Ms. Mwango says, but it has been able to add two positions in the past five years. One of those is her own job, technical coordinator, which bridges the gap between the aid office and information technology. The other is a client-services coordinator, who oversees communication with families.

Santa Fe has done a number of things to reduce administrative burden, Ms. Mwango says. It automated verification, a process that confirms the accuracy of information provided on selected students’ aid applications. It also works with a vendor called Financial Aid TV. When it’s time to apply for aid, students are sent a playlist of videos describing how to do it. The videos answer many basic questions, Ms. Mwango says, freeing up staff to handle more complicated ones.

Another tool for cutting staff time spent on simple questions is the on-campus call center, which handles phone calls about student services. The center’s staff members can resolve about two-thirds of the financial-aid calls that come in without involving anyone in the aid office, Ms. Mwango says.

Those strategies may not be enough to take the stress out of working in financial aid. But they at least help aid administrators spend more time on the work that drew them to the profession in the first place: helping students.

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