While many universities are working on their long-term financial stability, we must never forget that students are struggling financially too.
It’s now so vital that we do all that we can to help students to access more of the financial support that they themselves need and that we guide them to be far better prepared to manage their own personal finances.
We need the sector to protect and sustain its investment in scholarships, bursaries, hardship funds, and all those additional streams of money that universities have been able to support more determinedly amidst the cost of learning crisis.
Equally, we need those that are working in student financial support to work much harder at capturing the direct outcomes of this investment on retention, continuation, progression, and on student performance.
Alongside this, we need far better coordination of the range of investments that an individual university is making in student support – presently we have a high degree of fragmentation because such funding is being channelled and managed from within various academic departments, the alumni and development office, the international office, and so on.
This means we often have a varied student financial experience, and we are nowhere near making the most of the consistent and collective firepower of the combined student support that we have available. This is making the role and contribution of those on the frontline of supporting students with their daily financial worries and challenges so much harder.
Thirty years of NASMA
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the National Association of Student Money Advisors (NASMA). Before 1995, student financial advice and support was extremely limited, and universities operated with very different structures and resources for this service.
Since then, NASMA has helped to drive forward the strategic importance, structures, roles, and contribution of professional student counsel and support when it comes to student finances.
One thing we have achieved is that all universities now at least have a core financial embedded function within student services or within finance – and reporting on some element of student finance is pretty much now a regular feature of university governance.
To mark the 30-year milestone, NASMA has been working with the JS Group – a specialist in the effective and efficient delivery of student bursaries, scholarships, and other such additional funds – to capture recent examples of stand-out practice and innovation when it comes to the student financial experience of universities.
These examples form NASMA and the JS Group’s joint #exceptional campaign – which is not only celebrating more advanced methods of financial support and improvement but also providing a rallying call for even more change and invention in this vital aspect of the student experience.
What we found
The campaign report identifies four main trends in recent financial support innovation across UK higher education institutions.
These cover –
- A more favourable culture change and commitment by university leadership towards student financial wellbeing.
- Creation of much more targeted forms of student funding that recognise the ever-changing nature of financial pressures – especially in relation to transport, energy bills, technology needs, course materials, and for regaining a better “campus sticky” belonging through subsidised clubs and society memberships or other on-campus community activities.
- Designing new roles and teams to provide highly specialist advice – especially in an era of growing scams and of new forms of financial fraud, where keeping pace with threats, and how to counter these, is vital to student safety.
- Stronger and more proactive efforts to prepare and to educate students about their personal finances at a crucial time in their lives – often becoming a student is the first point of personal independence and of any form of money management.
Innovation in action
The #exceptional campaign includes more precise illustrations on these developments. The University of Salford, for example, has appointed a dedicated Payment Security Compliance Officer – a specialist expert on scam detection – who originally worked as a bookmaker.
The University of Bristol has recruited a former Customer Experience Manager from the Nationwide Building Society to lead a student-facing Customer Experience Directorate.
Nottingham Trent University now has financial capability workshops for students that are embedded into the formal course curriculum across a range of faculties.
The University of Hertfordshire has revamped its whole governance and created a formal Evaluation Working Group to oversee the connection between investment in student financial support and the outcomes achieved, as a consequence.
My own university, the University of the West of Scotland, has a very high proportion of mature students – who have more heightened financial pressures because they directly support families and juggle ongoing career expenses. We have had to design and produce tailored toolkits to inform these types of students about issues such as credit union schemes, car loans, and savings plans.
The University of Stirling has similarly launched workbooks so that students can create their own budgets, track personal spending habits, and understand the whole “buy now, pay later” landscape. The University of Sheffield is one of many universities which has now adopted its own online “student funding calculator” to guide real-time decision-making on student money.
Where the money goes
Perhaps one of the biggest areas of transformation is with the actual amount being invested in, and the use of, financial support by universities. The JS Group works with 40 universities to transform the whole delivery of such scholarships, bursaries, and hardship funds – and align these to learning gain – and they’ve already been reporting on these annual trends for Wonkhe.
One such JS Group partnership is with the University of Sunderland, which has established a new Emergency Hardship Fund as a more immediate, same-day payment solution for those in the most immediate and severe financial difficulties.
Our campaign points out other examples of accommodating the changing needs of struggling students – such as at the University of Oxford, which has made a particular investment in supporting long-distance travel by selected UK undergraduate students at the start and end of terms, with tiers of funding available to those living more than 80 miles away and even higher levels of support for those who live beyond 150 miles.
The University of Sussex, meanwhile, has launched a whole new range of scholarships for refugees and for those who have been displaced from homes in war zones – all part of the university’s social justice and humanitarian mission.
What comes next
While we’re thrilled to see so much positive change, investment, and innovation among NASMA members through our #exceptional campaign, we know that there is still a great deal of work to do.
We want our campaign to fuel advancement in three particular and key areas –
- Stronger and tighter measurement and reporting of the specific impact of financial support on students.
- Increased control and coordination of the many and varied sources of student financial support within individual universities.
- Faster and more secure delivery of payments into the pockets of students.
