Reach, Engage and Retain Your Students with Financial Aid Help Desk Support!
Scene 1, Financial aid office of a college: Two phones ringing incessantly, an inbox flooded with emails from prospective students, a pile of financial aid applications lying unprocessed, and a clock announcing the end of office hours.
Scene 2, Somewhere in the US: A student, exasperated with the rising cost of getting a college degree, calls the financial aid office continuously, sends his 4th email since morning, resolves to visit the office in person the next day.
What might appear like two scenes out of a modern-day tragicomedy belonging to The Theatre of Absurd, are a routine during the enrollment season in universities. Increasingly expensive degrees make financial aid help desk support imperative to get in and stay in- college. As if it isn’t already difficult enough, steps in the complicated process of getting the required financial aid. That’s when Financial Aid Help Desk Services come to your rescue.
Financial Aid Help Desk assists the students with filling applications, providing the information about the available grants/ scholarship options, tracking the financial aid status, and receiving the awards. It attends the prospective and returning students’ calls and answers the emails around-the-clock.
Obtaining financial aid is an overwhelming process. There are so many steps that need to be followed, documentation to be done that a first-timer finds the application process cumbersome. The financial aid help desk guides the applicant from the initial documentation to the reception of the aid. Financial aid makes it possible for a great number of students to go to college or afford a college they thought they couldn’t, thus financial aid help desk services play a crucial role in a student’s life cycle. Besides being life-changing for the students, financial aid is critical for higher education institutions also. The following are three ways in which financial aid help desk support helps institutions accelerate their student success objectives.
Increases Student Enrollment:
Institutions spend millions on enrollment campaigns. So, if these potential students don’t get converted into enrolled ones, they lose out on all that money. A financial aid office becomes a critical marketing feature for any institution to attract prospective students. It provides prospective students with detailed information about the financial aid process and thus increases an institution’s enrollment rate.
Increases Student Retention and Graduation Rates:
Students who have access to financial aid are more likely to stay in and graduate from college. Thus, if an institution has a financial aid help desk, students don’t have to drop out because of financial constraints and get the aid they deserve, resulting in higher retention rates for the institutions.
Frees Up Your Staff:
A proficient financial aid help desk leaves your IT staff free to attend to various other tasks like reviewing applications, verifications, disbursement, etc. AI has automated the financial aid help desk and simplified the award process significantly.
Thus, a financial aid help desk scales the growing gap between the number of students who can receive financial aid and those who actually end up starting classes and completing graduation at an institution.