New applicants from families with unpaid tuition balances

Brian LeBlanc
Brian LeBlanc
Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™

Hello all!

We have had a couple of instances this enrollment cycle where we have placed financial holds on re-enrollment for students with unpaid balances, but the parent either doesn't know or doesn't care that there is an unpaid balance and applies for a sibling to attend. So admissions is dealing with the new application, but the business office is dealing with the existing student, and neither really has access to the other without a ton of manual work.

We do not want to enroll a new applicant from a family which is in arrears (in a perfect world, we'd waitlist the new applicant until the family is paid up), but I can't really think of a good way to implement that policy at scale. There's no way admissions can (or should be asked to) keep up with currently enrolled siblings who have unpaid balances, but there's also no way we can prevent new siblings from applying.

How do other schools handle these scenarios? I'm drawing a total blank here and would welcome any insight. Thanks!

Comments

  • Sarah Bienvenue
    Sarah Bienvenue
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi Brian, I'll let other schools chime in there, but I wanted to let you know that we have additional holds work slated for this summer. I'm wondering if there is a way for us to indicate that the siblings student has a financial hold to help with this. I'll keep you posted as we get closer.

    Thanks,

    Sarah

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    This would be helpful for our school as well. Currently we have to manually debrief with finance, academic deans, and admissions to get the full picture regarding holds and enrollments. Maybe with the new Households feature it will be easier to get some kind of unified status for families?

  • Bryan Lorenzo
    Bryan Lorenzo Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Brian LeBlanc - if you run the Community Connection report, it should give you all the candidates with students' siblings. We run this report after the application deadline.

    The admissions office could run this for the business office to review. The business office usually knows those who have a large amount of tuition in arrears off the top of their head.

  • Bryan Lorenzo
    Bryan Lorenzo Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Sarah Bienvenue - looking forward to this! It would be awesome to get hold notifications added for tuition contracts like those in academics. It would avoid phone calls and email when contracts are published if they could see why their contract was on hold.

  • Brian LeBlanc
    Brian LeBlanc
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    Jess Moxley:

    This would be helpful for our school as well. Currently we have to manually debrief with finance, academic deans, and admissions to get the full picture regarding holds and enrollments. Maybe with the new Households feature it will be easier to get some kind of unified status for families?

    I was thinking that Households would be a logical place to house a function like this. Ideally it would flag a household so that if a member of a family tried to apply for a new student while another student had a hold on their account, they would get an error and wouldn't even be able to begin the process.

    @Bryan Lorenzo, that's pretty much exactly the manual process that we do now - we do it just a little differently, outputting a list from Tuition Management then putting the holds on in Enrollment Management, but it's a different way to arrive at the same destination. (And yes, I agree with you on displaying holds in Enrollment Management! In admissions, we don't spend enough time in Core to make that a natural place to look without intentionally going there.)

    @Sarah Bienvenue, thank you for that exciting update! I don't know if anyone else has told you, so I'll go for it: I greatly appreciate the efforts you've made over the past year or so to make things talk to each other more efficiently. This re-enrollment season has been way less stressful than previous ones, and your hard work is not unnoticed and is very much appreciated!

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