The more we dug into it, we kept seeing that - you know - these charges are having
an impact on on retention because students were being separated from our
institution for unpaid balances that were not tied to any sort of academic
fee. Welcome to FOCUS, a podcast dedicated to
the business of higher education. I'm your host, Heather Richmond, and we
will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher
learning institutions. In this episode, I'll be talking with Megan Carr, director of
the cashiers office at the University of Missouri.
We'll discuss their solution to stop unnecessary fees from showing up with a
student count and the benefits of a payment platform for multiple channels.
Hi Megan. Thanks for being our guest today.
Absolutely, glad to be here, Heather. I know that now more than ever student
retention is a priority for all campuses and when you joined Mizzou that was one
of your first challenges. Tell us about that.
Yes, shortly after joining Mizzou in 2015 I started working with my leadership
team in my department to see what was kind of working or not working here in
the department. Specifically you know aspects related to the student account. A
reoccurring same theme that kept popping up is that there were over a hundred and
fifty different line items that were on the student account that were outside
the traditional tuition course fees, mandatory fees, room, board, parking, etc.
And so as we started to dig into those fees
we discovered that there was not a consistent time period to which those
fees were being applied to the student account and so they were essentially
coming on later in the semester. So for example let's say the student was at an
event in August, swiped their ID card, well those charges didn't come over on the
student account until maybe October or November. So either a third or the last
bill of the semester and so students were not realizing. Obviously you know
that those charges hadn't come along with our account and when they did come
onto the account they probably forgot that they needed to pay a bill. And so
the trickle-down effect was essentially you know past due holds being placed on
accounts which then stopped these students from being able to register for
future semesters or get a transcript due to unpaid balance. And so the more we dug
into it we kept seeing that you know these charges are having an impact on
retention because students were being separated from our institution for
unpaid balances that were not tied to any sort of academic fee. Wow so it sounds
like your student account was really acting as a holding account for all
these surges on campus. Unfortunately yes it was.
We had charges that were tied to almost anything and everything. We had
non-academic materials that could be purchased through a bookstore as far as
like sweatshirts or we had a lovely Clinique counter in our bookstore that
student could purchase items through. Also various activities or events that
were happening across campus. And so students were just freely swiping their
ID card and essentially had an open line of credit and these charges would then
be on to their student account. And you know students may forget that they had
done that or mom and dad were quite surprised and they would eventually get
the bill and see these charges out there. And so it was just kind of obviously
causing more concern than anything. So Meghan was there a subset of students of
these account charges affected. Actually it was open to all students. So any
student that was enrolled and had an ID card essentially could swipe or
participate in purchasing any of these events or items at the different
departments. Wow so I can see how this become a big problem pretty fast right.
Yes being a large campus it quickly kind of spun out of control. Absolutely and so
is this common practice to just be able to be buying anything on campus or not
really buying anything on campus and putting on your student account.
Unfortunately it was a common practice here at Mizzou. Again I joined in 2015
and so as I was talking through with my staff we realized that this was this was
an issue, but again it was culture of campus. It was a decision that
had been made many years ago. Mostly to have departments get out of handling
cash. So they shifted everything to the student account, but again it was causing
you know significant retention issues as far as you know unpaid balances, not
allowing students to go through to progress to future semesters. So we knew
we needed to do something different to both help the institution, as well as you
know, allow these students to you know keep progressing, because our you know
our end goal is to get them to graduation. Right and it's really
interesting it's probably not a place that a lot of people would look first to
say where do we have a student retention problem. Oh I bet it's the student account.
Well my staff knew that it was an issue just because of the the customer service
aspects that it was causing. But then as we started to you know drill into you
know more in depth, you know we started to see an issue and we started to get
others from enrollment management involved and everyone was an
agreement like yes this is something we need to fix. But how do we fix it.
Right yeah, so obviously you need to find that solution that allowed really these
departments around campus to take their own real-time payments and not charge the
student account. So how did you resolve that? Right exactly, because you know we
knew these activities or these charges that were coming over onto the student
account you know had a revenue generating component to them. And they
were - it was money that departments were using to you know sustain their
operation or provide other services. So we knew we just couldn't essentially cut
you know these departments off at the knees. We needed to provide them with a
platform that allowed them to continue accepting these charges or these
payments for these various events or activities, but not necessarily beyond
the student account. We wanted to make sure and separate the student account
from you know non-academic related fees. We wanted to keep the student account as
clean as possible - focusing it mostly on tuition and any mandatory fees, room,
board, parking. But the other miscellaneous fees needed to go
somewhere else. So I've had previous experience working
with Marketplace and TouchNet at other institutions that I
was at. And so knowing the background that I came from, I knew that there were
other solutions out there that we could use as a storefront concept for these
departments. So we started to put together a business case and started to
explore what the options were on the market. And we everything kept pointing
back to TouchNet and Marketplace. And so it took us a little while to essentially
get all of the necessary stakeholders on board and present our business case and
explain why we needed to move forward with this, but eventually we landed on
Marketplace is going to be the best solution for our campus. That's great and
it really allows all your departments to have their own storefront and be able to
take their own payments and then also makes the student pay right then and
there, right? Right, exactly, and one aspect that we liked about
Marketplace then they had the TouchNet ready functionality that we had a lot of
departments that had you know a front-end software system that worked
best for their needs. But we just needed to figure out how to
get that payment piece connected instead of having it go through the student
account. And so the TouchNet Ready partner aspect is really something that helped
our business case. Oh that's great and do you know how many different TouchNet
Ready partners are you can I get into right now? We are currently connected
into to TouchNet ready partners and we have one more in the pipeline that we
should be bringing on board in the next three months. That's great.
And I know that when you made this decision it was really for all four
campuses. So how are you managing that? It was so essentially Mizzou being the
flagship campus of the University of Missouri system and that's you know
where my position is at; I was looking at it specifically from my campus's point
of view. But as we rolled out the business case we started to learn that
the other campuses in the UM system also had a need for Marketplace and so our
UM system controller's office and our vice president of finance made the
decision, in conjunction with the other campuses
that Marketplace is something that we could operate as a shared service.
Essentially you know keeping the cost relatively revenue neutral and you know
having it centralized from an operational standpoint. So once we
decided to move forward with purchasing TouchNet we also started to implement a
shared services model. So allowing essentially we've - we've created one
dedicated full-time position that lives centrally here on the Columbia campus,
but supports the other three campuses in the UM system. And so we've been able to
roll that out and to date we've had and - I want to make sure everybody knows this
we just went live with Marketplace back in March of 2019. So to
date we've brought on board about fifty u-stores and or u-pay sites, two
TouchNet ready partners and within the next three months we think we're going to
bring on board about another fifteen u- stores or u-pay sites and one more
TouchNet ready partner. Wow that's a lot. Yes, we've been very busy right. So you
have the one dedicated resource to really help it in those different store
fronts and u-pay sites. Is there somebody else on each of those campuses
also managing it from ongoing daily basis? So the approach that we have taken
is that we have created like a train-the-trainer mentality. So we've got
one staff member who's dedicated and due to the volume we've brought on
board another support staff that helps about fifty percent of the time with
bringing the storefronts, creating the storefront sort of u-pay sites but
then once they're live we essentially train the department on how to manage
their their storefront because we really want them to own to own this; and as they
move forward with going live we're just here as a resource to answer any
questions or help them pull reports that they may need That's great; that's a good
way of doing in train-the-trainer approach is always best, right? Right, yes,
and for our volume that was really the only way that we could we it seemed
feasible to us to manage this. Absolutely, well and I know that implementing
marketplace actually helped to resolve that student count issue but at the same
time it really helped to teach students an important
lesson, right? Right, exactly and so that that was kind of another theme that was
happening here on our campuses. We wanted to teach the students more
financial responsibility you know previously we had this open line of
credit so to speak where students could just freely swipe their ID card and then
pay for it later, but now where we're shifting the focus with Marketplace
that we want students to you know maybe think twice about what they're
purchasing. And you know and certainly not discouraging them from making any
purchases, but you know be mindful of what can they and can't they afford
because again we want to set them up for success after college. So have you seen
an increase in retention then when you may be changes? I believe so I actually
haven't pulled you know specific numbers because I've been so head deep and the
Marketplace implementation. I haven't been able to pull specific numbers but
you know anecdotally I feel like we've seen seen an increase because our our
pass to holds or less. We're not essentially having the
customer service calls that my office was initially. So I you know I feel like
we've made steps in the right direction and hopefully the data would support
that. That's great and so that was the problem you're trying to solve but at
the same time you also were able to solve a PCI compliance problem. So how is
this move to marketplace helped in your compliance efforts? Right so again still
you know newly working on marketplace and all of our initiatives, but you know
long term our plan is to make TouchNet, you know the primary payment gateway for
e-commerce operations across the University of Missouri system . We've got
some ways to go, but we're hoping that we can push everything into TouchNet and
you know create a better SAQ process or PCI compliance process for those
departments. Because right now we've got twenty total payment gateways; so 19
outside of TouchNet; and so we've got some opportunity to transition more
departments over to TouchNet over the course of time, but I'm optimistic that
we'll get there. Right but you already reduce some of your different
applications of payment gateways just as you consolidated into
the storefronts, right? Right we absolutely did and so a lot of
departments that were you know have we're both taking in-person payments or
had a an online presence through the student count; they've essentially gotten
out of those in-person payments and have shifted more of their focus to the
online. And so that's obviously decrease the number of questions that they have
to answer yearly. Since we've went live with marketplace again back on March 1st,
we've processed over 1.6 million dollars and that was through March 1st through
October 31st of this year [2019]. Yeah that's amazing.
Yeah I know you were also saying that you really want to take this more of a
platform approach and have a you know single entity for capturing your payments.
Yes so we're trying again to you know have everything go through TouchNet
as much as we can because it if we are only working with one specific
vendor, then obviously that's less work that we have is you know from a treasury
standpoint. Because I will admit I'm not the one that has to do PCI compliance here
on across the UM campus that lives elsewhere, but again working with them we
we just we knew that there's opportunity to have TouchNet as you know the
primary preferred gateway. That's great, but it sounds like a lot of change and
you know really a short amount of time any obstacles to transitioning from
charging the student account to departmental store friends and
implementing everything? Always. I would say probably the biggest hurdle and we
knew this going into it is that in higher education we as institutions
sometimes don't move as quickly as we would like for multiple reasons.
And so my office knew that any changes that we were going to make it
was going to take some time to you know create the business proposal, show the
need on why we need to do a new platform, as well as, just engage all of the
different stakeholders and so that was probably the biggest challenge just
getting the right people in the room; making sure they understood what we were
trying to do, get get buy-in once. We knew that this was going to be a system-wide
shared service solution, then having to get the other campuses on board. And so
all of that really took about two years to do, but once everybody was on board
then we were able to move pretty quickly. We were able to you know get the
contract negotiated signed and start our implementation. Yeah that's great, and so
who were the various stakeholders that need to be involved to make this happen?
Oh this ranged from the business office - to each of the directors. My
counterparts in the business office, as well as, the CFO'son each of
the campuses. We also want to make sure and have conversations with enrollment
management to get their support on why we were taking things off of the student
account; the different departments; and then eventually it landed at the the
system level for the vice president of finance to you know have the
conversation with the CFOs and reach an agreement to move forward. Yeah that's
the most important thing the enrollment management piece it may be something
that you don't always think about but that's really essential when it comes to
students and how you're working with them, right. Right exactly I mean
obviously we're all here for the students, and we want to keep doing
what's best for them. But we we just knew that you know this was an issue. And this -
when I first joined Mizzou I actually had ran into someone within enrollment
management and you know they were like, you know about your student charge
issue, right? And I'm like, I'm learning more. So it was something that
people were aware of and it wasn't you necessarily the best practice, but again,
we've been able to resolve that. Right well I think you know having 150
different line items, everyone probably looked at it like, oh how are we gonna
make this better? Exactly, exactly. It really just took you know dedication
from my staff and also you know the support that I had from my division to
you know move forward with making these changes. That's great. So any other advice
that you have to give other campuses looking to make any type of process
improvement changes. Oh gosh be willing to dig in
and you know be patient that it's going to take time to eventually resolve and
my personality I'm always wanting to get things done you know most efficiently
and as quickly as possible but that sometimes not realistic. And so I had to
be mindful of that. So my best advice is just you know be patient and if you're
you know really gung-ho and feel like it's this is the right move, it will
happen. That's great advice on that. Well thanks so much, Megan, for all your
insights today on taking a different approach to ensure student retention,
while teaching financial responsibility. Absolutely, happy to be here.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of FOCUS. Don't forget to subscribe so you
can stay up to date on the business of higher education. For more information,
check us out at TouchNet.com.