Earning top marks in the Northeast for high post-graduate earnings, economic mobility and economic diversity, Boston-based Wentworth Institute of Technology has had a reputation for academic excellence with practical application for more than 100 years. Some 97% of graduates land work in their fields of study with median starting salaries of more than $70,000.
Student success can’t happen without options and flexibility to fund the higher education journey. While in 2022, 99% of accepted students received a merit scholarship and 85% received some type of financial aid, interest-free payment plans are also an important part of that equation. Payment plans reduce borrowing, helping to put higher education within a student and/or family’s budget and reach – and are particularly critical given Wentworth’s high population of first-generation college students.
With Wentworth’s previous payment plan system failing to meet expectations, causing confusion for students and families, and creating extra work for Wentworth staff, a change was critical. As Senior Associate Director of Student Accounts and the parent of a Wentworth student, Lauren Margharita knew that all too well, as did her colleague Conor Weiss, Associate Director of Systems.
Wentworth University at a glance
- 3,958 undergraduate students
- 207 graduate students
- Students from 70 countries, representing 7% of the student body
Problem: Previous system causes frustration for parents, students and staff
Payment plan information never seemed to display correctly to families or administrators in their previous system. Because of complex accounting logic the previous system used to pull data from the institution’s Ellucian Banner SIS, what students owed and what was shown on their balance seldom matched. For example, a payment would come in for one semester, but it would reduce a balance in a different semester. At best, that would lead to phone calls and emails from confused students and families, and at worst, result in a hold on an account where there should not have been one.
“We needed to do a lot of triage and account massaging to get people’s plans to work at all with our old system. There were a lot of questions and a lot of cleanups,” said Weiss, who, with eight years at Wentworth has become the liaison between IT and finance, had the happy task of doing that cleanup.
The questions most often fell to Margharita’s team, who were “constantly apologizing for something that wasn’t our fault, it wasn’t right in our prior system,” she said. “It felt like a full time job for a while, just trying to understand and figure out the plans.”
Solution: Switching to Flywire increased payment plan enrollment by 33%
When Heather Clang joined as Bursar in 2021, she knew exactly what would solve their payment plan woes. Having used Flywire’s Student Financial Software (SFS) in a previous role, Clang knew Flywire could help handle everything from billing to payment plans, and easily connect to its Ellucian SIS. With Wentworth already successfully using Flywire for international payments, expanding the Flywire partnership was the perfect fit.
“Switching from our previous solution to Flywire was like night and day,” Weiss said.
The evidence is in the numbers. After deploying Flywire’s SFS solution in June 2023, enrollment in payment plans increased by 33% year-over-year – which the team attributes to the ease and intuitiveness of Flywire. In the Fall of 2023, Wentworth had 908 active payment plans, which represented roughly 25% of the student population – an all-time high that continued to grow into 2024. And payment plan ease is spurring retention and student success as a result: of the 1,861 plans activated since the Flywire SFS implementation, 89% have been completed and paid in full.
In addition, matching processes are now automated and accurate. It is also straightforward for staff to configure and customize payment plan terms – for example, start dates can easily be changed from the first to the 15th of the month without help from developers. Even better, emails related to payment plan questions have also dropped significantly. If there are questions, the team no longer has to play detective to figure them out – they are now able to quickly see what the student sees, view the account history and walk families through it.
“The user interface is so simple and straightforward,” Margharita said. “That was a difference I noticed as a parent with a payment plan on Flywire too. The Flywire solution is easy to use and navigate.”
Results
Switching from our previous solution to Flywire was like night and day.
