Faster Enrollment and Aid Decisions, Guaranteed
Help students move through enrollment and financial aid faster while keeping their information protected. Automate the checks, documents, and communications your team handles every day, so you can reduce delays, stay compliant, and support students from application to graduation.
Key Issues in Education Operations
Many admissions teams rely on manual document checks, scattered systems, and outdated workflows. This slows down application reviews, creates bottlenecks during peak enrollment periods, and makes it difficult to give students timely decisions.
Schools often juggle credit checks, income verification, and sensitive financial data from multiple sources. When these steps aren’t automated, financial aid decisions take longer, causing student frustration and delaying tuition planning.
Educational institutions must protect student information under FERPA while maintaining detailed audit trails. Managing compliance manually increases the risk of errors, security gaps, and inconsistent reporting across admissions and financial aid teams.
Real Improvements Across the Student Journey
Automated checks and document workflows cut review time, helping teams process applications quickly and secure more committed students before deadlines.
Built-in safeguards, encryption, and audit trails keep sensitive student data secure and help institutions stay fully compliant with FERPA requirements.
Automated credit and income verification shortens approval times, allowing students to understand their funding options sooner and reducing stress during peak seasons.
Secure messaging tools make it simple to share updates, request missing documents, and keep students engaged throughout the enrollment and aid process.
Teams can step away from repetitive tasks and focus on supporting students, easing staffing pressure and cutting unnecessary operational delays.
Real-time audit trails and automated tracking reduce errors and ensure every enrollment and financial aid step is documented accurately.
Solutions Built for Modern Education Operations
Verify student identity, income, and financial readiness automatically. This reduces manual review, speeds up enrollment decisions, and ensures every verification step meets regulatory standards.
Generate forms, collect signatures, and manage student documents in one secure place. This eliminates paperwork delays and keeps admissions, financial aid, and compliance teams aligned.
Share updates, request missing documents, and send approvals through secure, student-friendly channels. Everything stays compliant while communication becomes faster and more reliable.
Run credit checks, gather required documents, and manage aid disbursements in a unified workflow. Students receive decisions faster, and teams avoid back-and-forth data collection.
Encrypted messaging, secure storage, and verified identity checks keep student information protected at every step, helping institutions stay compliant without extra manual work.
Collect tuition, process financial aid disbursements, and handle billing from a central, automated system. This reduces administrative work and improves accuracy for finance teams.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can schools speed up student enrollment without risking compliance?
Institutions are continually looking for methods to expedite application processing times while still complying with Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations. They can accomplish this by using encrypted communications, automated identification check tools, and secure document workflow tools to reduce delays while maintaining the confidentiality of student data.
- Automating the verification of student data reduces the need for manual reviews
- Using secure communication tools protects student data from being exposed
- Built in audit trails enables institutions to efficiently prepare for FERPA compliance reviews
By implementing the above strategies, institutions can significantly enhance the efficiency of the enrollment process while protecting the safety and security of both students and staff.
What is the best way to verify financial aid information quickly?
Financial aid teams typically experience challenges when performing income verifications, manually entering data, and communicating back and forth with students about the status of their financial aid eligibility. Financial aid teams can use automated tools such as income verification through Plaid Bank Connect, tax verification, and credit checks to rapidly confirm a student's eligibility for financial aid.
These types of tools can shorten the length of time it takes for a student to receive notification of their eligibility for financial aid and also give students greater clarity regarding what funding options they may be eligible for earlier in the process.
How can universities reduce paperwork and manage student documents securely?
Although many universities continue to process a significant number of paper-based documents, including PDFs, forms and attachments via email, platforms that provide document generation, the ability to collect signatures electronically and central document repositories enable university staff to create standardized forms, track which forms have been completed and store documents with encryption. The use of these platforms minimizes the risks associated with lost or incomplete files and simplifies the auditing process for the institution.
What tools help keep students updated during admissions and aid processing?
Communication timing is a major source of frustration for students. University staff can communicate securely to students via email, text message and/or file sharing with encryption to provide students with reminders, ask for additional information, and provide them with approval notifications in a manner that does not expose student data.
Our cmEngage suite provides university staff with a single, compliant communication tool that can be used within current workflows to communicate with students throughout the admissions and financial aid processing periods.
How do educational institutions handle verification for thousands of applicants?
Educational institutions that receive a large number of applications often rely on automated verification systems to verify applicant identities, perform credit screenings, and validate supporting documentation on a large scale. Our cmVerify suite enables the admissions and financial aid teams to process large volumes of applicants quickly and efficiently without experiencing delays. As a result, this will eliminate the need for manual labor, reduce errors, and facilitate consistency in decision making across departments.
