Financial aid season is about to get even more complicated
As a strategic leader, I spend a lot of time talking with Navigate360 partners about ways to connect offices across campus within a coordinated technology ecosystem—what we call a “coordinated care network.” Financial aid is increasingly one of the first offices many student success leaders look to partner with—and for good reason. Cost and financial aid challenges remain one of the top reasons students leave college, and with the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) introducing major changes to student loans this July, an already confusing process is about to get even harder to navigate.
Here are three ways to use your student success technology to strengthen collaboration with financial aid teams, drawn from the work of three Navigate360 partners.
How to identify students with incomplete financial aid
Before institutions can remove barriers to financial aid completion, they need a clear process for identifying where students are getting stuck. Despite changes to the financial aid process over the past several years, one thing remains true: it’s complicated. Between jargon-heavy questions, the tax requirements, and recent technical glitches, many students have trouble to navigate the financial aid process. In some cases, that complexity can keep students from pursuing their education entirely—a challenge that disproportionately affects first-generation students and students from underrepresented backgrounds.
To better support students in these situations, institutions can put a few simple processes in place to identify and act on incomplete financial aid requirements:
- Pull regular reports of students with incomplete FAFSA applications or verification requirements. In Navigate360, teams can do this with AI reporting tools that use plain-language prompts and can be automated to run at regular intervals.
- Add financial uncertainty as a hand-raise option so students can self-identify when they encounter barriers.
- Launch tailored outreach campaigns via email, text, or calls to prompt next steps that include time-bound calls to action
Holyoke Community College reduced barriers to financial aid completion
Challenge
At Holyoke Community College, students complete an online orientation as part of the enrollment process. HCC staff were surprised to learn that only 53% of orientation attendees had a completed financial aid package, including an application for the state’s free community college program. Many students either hadn’t submitted their FAFSA or didn’t realize they were missing additional requirements.
Without a clear way to surface and address these gaps, students often turned to academic advisors for help or disengaged from the aid process entirely, putting their enrollment in serious jeopardy. To address this, Holyoke used Navigate360 to build a more proactive process to identify and support students before they fell off track. This early, personalized outreach helped more students access the financial resources they needed to enroll and persist at Holyoke Community College.
Solution
- Identified students who completed orientation but had no FAFSA on file or were missing required documents
- Flagged those students for follow-up so both financial aid staff and advisors had visibility into outstanding requirements
- Sent tailored outreach prompting students to complete next steps or schedule time with financial aid
- Coordinated across admissions, advising, and financial aid to ensure students were routed to the right support
Impact
- In Fall 2023, HCC’s “Missing Aid Requirements” alert drove a 14% increase (from 53% to 67%) in completed financial aid packages among enrolled students
- 100% of students flagged as eligible for Massachusetts’ Free Community College program submitted the paperwork needed to confirm eligibility
Financial aid retention: Tracking students at-risk of losing aid before it’s gone
Once schools know what to watch for, technology can help them keep an eye on student progress and catch warning signs early. Helping students secure financial aid is just the beginning. Helping them keep it is just as important and, in many cases, even more challenging. Students can lose aid for a myriad of reasons: falling below the credit hour threshold, missing a renewal deadline, or struggling academically in ways that affect their eligibility. But most students don’t realize their aid is in jeopardy until it’s already gone.
Student success and financial aid teams should work together to define what “at risk” looks like for their institution, whether that’s a student who’s behind on credits, missing satisfactory academic progress benchmarks, or approaching a renewal deadline without meeting requirements. Once those signals are defined, technology can automate the work of early identification by monitoring student progress and automatically flagging students who need outreach before the situation becomes a crisis.
Washburn University helped students stay eligible for scholarship aid
Challenge
Washburn University launched its Promise Scholarship in May 2023. Aimed at supporting low-income students in Shawnee County, the program provides a “last-dollar” scholarship to cover tuition and fees not met by other aid. But within the first year, staff saw a major risk emerging: more than half of recipients had already lost other merit aid, and 30% were at risk of losing their Promise Scholarship because they weren’t meeting renewal requirements like credit completion.
There wasn’t a consistent way for student success and financial aid teams to identify students who were falling off track or step in to help them once issues had been identified. To address these inconsistencies, Washburn used Navigate360 to track, communicate with, and support Promise scholars to help them retain this critical funding.
Solution
- Tagged all Promise Scholarship recipients so they could be tracked as a group
- Monitored key renewal requirements like credit completion and academic progress
- Flagged students who were off track (e.g., not earning enough credits to maintain eligibility)
- Launched timely outreach and advising campaigns to address specific risks, like encouraging summer enrollment or connecting students to academic support
- Enabled both student success and financial aid teams to see and act on risk in real time
Impact
- In Fall 2024, Promise Scholars increased their average earned credits by 13.5% to 13.05 credits per term
- More than half of Promise Scholars (55%) achieved a credit completion rate of 90% or higher
- Washburn’s first cohort of Promise Scholars retention rate rose to just 2 percentage points below the institutional average
Routing financial aid concerns faster with a coordinated workflow
What separates effective financial support from missed opportunities is a clear, trackable process for acting on student concerns. One of the most common challenges I encounter when helping institutions track and respond to student concerns is moving from identification to action. While there are many ways a student or staff member might raise financial concerns, what happens next is seldom consistent or clear. Without a coordinated system and clearly defined expectations, support teams can miss these risk signals, and the student is more likely to fall through the cracks. This danger gets more acute as financial aid teams are asked to take on more work with fewer resources.Â
A student CRM like Navigate360 helps institutions address many of these concerns by building out a coordinated care network of support teams across campus, all connected through shared information and consistent, automated workflows. Importantly, it allows teams to track interventions, assign follow-up, and monitor resolutions to ensure student concerns are addressed consistently and appropriately.Â
Colorado State University helped get students get faster support
Challenge
At Colorado State University, students with financial aid questions often struggled to get timely help. Advisors were frequently the first to hear about financial concerns, but there wasn’t a consistent process for routing those issues to the financial aid office or ensuring follow-up. With few staff and many student questions, some student concerns were delayed or never fully resolved.
To fix this, Colorado State used Navigate360 to create a clear, trackable workflow from the moment a financial issue was raised.
Solution
- Enabled advisors to flag financial concerns when students shared them (e.g., difficulty paying for school)
- Automatically routed those alerts to the financial aid office
- Created a shared case system so both advising and financial aid could track the status of each issue
- Set expectations for financial aid to follow-up, with a goal of responding within three business days
- Tracked whether outreach happened and whether students responded
Impact
- Students who responded to financial aid outreach were 7% likely to persist to the next term, compared with 50% of students who did not respond
- Students who responded to outreach earned 16.7% to 37.5% more credits than students who did not respond
- Colorado State set a service goal for 90% of financial aid alerts to receive follow-up within 3 business days, helping create a faster, more consistent response process
Why coordination matters for students
Student success teams play a critical role in spotting financial risk earlier, responding quickly, and keeping students connected to the support they need. As Holyoke, Washburn, and Colorado State demonstrate, stronger coordination between student success and financial aid teams makes it easier to turn disconnected signals into timely action. With the right processes and technology in place, institutions are better positioned to keep students enrolled and on track for success.
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