Supporting student finances with data-led payment plans

In countries and situations where student loans and support grants for tuition are not a given, many students and their families struggle to manage the regular payments required of them by their institution.

Speaking at a session at Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities Week US 2022, held in partnership with payment platform Flywire, Sharon Butler, executive vice-president of global education at Flywire, joined Robert Reddy, dean of student financial services at Northeastern University in the US, to discuss the value of data and creativity in offering support to those students.

“A lot of creative ideas are happening on campus in terms of, ‘how do we start up a new cohort, how do we set up a campus in another country?’” said Butler. “Quite often, the impact of financial services on student enrolment can be pretty dramatic and it’s important to think about that as change happens.”

Reddy described Northeastern University as “digital first”, and yet he admitted that, “like many places, we spent a lot of time thinking about the academic side, how to deliver education digitally…We haven’t spent the time we need to thinking about all of the services.”

“More of our students are moving around the world. So how do we set up the [payment] systems to manage those things?” Reddy questioned.

By taking a closer look at student data, Northeastern was able to gain a better understanding of “people’s capacity to handle the price point” of university fees. “One of the things we learned is that more of our learners are struggling to just make one or two payments to satisfy that semester,” he said. “More recently, we had delinquencies increasing and had people struggling to keep up with their three-payment plan. That drove the thinking around the idea of becoming more creative in terms of how we allow people to pay for their education costs.”

One solution supported by Flywire was to allow students to pay over a longer period of time and in smaller increments. “We had a 10 per cent take-up which I thought was fabulous,” said Reddy. “More than half of families said, ‘this plan is great. We love it. It’s a money management tool, but we still need more [support]’.”

The Flywire platform enables universities to receive regular payments from anywhere in the world, while at the same time helping students make payments in a way that is manageable for them.

Going forward, Northeastern will continue to look at its student financial data to seek new ways to support students through borrowing and payments, Reddy concluded.

Find out more about Flywire.