Board of Trustees to re-evaluate, revise policies

A significant increase in the amount of bad student debt that Northwest College will need to write off this year has school college leaders scratching their collective heads.

For the July 2016 to June 2017 fiscal year, Northwest College will record $275,486 of student account bad debt — up from $150,844 the previous year. The Board of Trustees was asked to write off that debt as uncollectible at its monthly board meeting last week.

“There was nothing on our end that changed; there were no procedural changes,” NWC President Stefani Hicswa told the board. “But absolutely we need to improve our processes and procedures and policies to do a better job. But there wasn’t anything that we can attribute to cause.”

That money can make a difference in the bottom line at community colleges facing declining enrollments and budget shortfalls.

“Every dollar counts when the time comes to cut services or pare academic programs,” Hicswa said.

Four years ago, then-interim NWC President Mark Kitchen commissioned a bad debt task force to come up with ways to reduce bad debt write-offs. It seemed to be working, as the total bad debt of $202,951 in 2014 dropped to around $150,000 for 2015 and 2016.

“We took that debt down and were hovering at the $150,000 range for a couple of years,” Hicswa said. “For whatever reason that total went back up again. We just need to keep ahead of it, and that means doing things to be more proactive up front. Those are things we really need to pay attention to.”

Unpaid balances can have long-term ramifications for students once they leave college, adversely affecting their ability to succeed. Under current procedures, a student may not enroll at NWC if they have a balance owed to the college. To assist students with their account balances, the Business Office has implemented a number of processes designed to let students know where they stand financially. Student statements are emailed bi-monthly, phone calls are made when students have pending financial aid to accept and each student has access to his or her account balance in the NWC Student Portal, where they can also make online payments. In-house payment plans are also available and students are required to sign a Student Responsibility Statement, designed to remind students they are responsible for paying for college.

“We know our students struggle, and that many of them have financial need,” Hicswa said. “We have such a heart for these students, but we’re not doing them any favors if we allow them to rack up debt. It’s not good for their credit rating, and it’s not good for their future. We have to be good stewards of our policies and procedures to implement things that will help them be successful.”

Hicswa said there wasn’t any one thing the college could point at to explain the increase. Factors could include a failure to pay all or part of a bill, failure to complete the financial aid process, withdrawal from classes and a loss of financial aid eligibility or third-party funding.

“We’ve looked at it, we’ve analyzed it, and we just really don’t know what it was,” she said. “But regardless of why, we have to address it. We have to implement more aggressive policies and procedures to catch those kind of things, so that we’re not in that position at the end of next year.”

Crunching the numbers sooner so that safety nets can be put in place will be a priority, Hicswa said. Plans being developed by the Business Office for fiscal year 2018 include researching the use of text messaging as a resource, developing a committee to improve processes that will aid in a student’s ability to succeed and implementing a timeline for sending older student accounts to collection in a timely manner.

“We give the students the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with them as much as we can,” Hicswa said. “But there’s more at play here, and as of yet, we don’t know what it is. But regardless of the where’s how’s and why’s, we need to address it.”

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, college students across the nation owe $1.4 trillion in student loans.