For the 2025-2026 academic year, Purdue University is on pace for another record year in applicants. In 2024, 78,526 students sought admission – with 11,388 ultimately enrolling as part of the largest freshman class of all time.
While student interest and admissions have increased, administrative support staff has not. The departments that fall under the Controller’s office are of course still responsible for providing high service levels as the number of student accounts and account touchpoints increase. That includes assisting students who have fallen behind in their tuition payments.
Higher education institutions like Purdue are seeing success in automating payment processes to increase their capacity, and make more time to guide students through more complex financial issues.
“I can’t imagine how much extra work we’d have to be doing if we were still doing collections the old way,” said Chad Lester, who is the Associate Bursar, Account Resolution and Loan Administration, at Purdue University, where he has worked for more than a decade.
About Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana flagship campus: 40,735 undergraduates + 9,673 graduate students
Indianapolis, Indiana campus: 2,634 undergraduates + 200 graduate students
Online: 801 undergraduates + 3,966 graduate students
Problem: Paper-based payment plans left staff calling to collect
The old way Lester is talking about is how Purdue University formerly handled past-due account management manually and worked to keep students enrolled. His staff mailed final demand letters to students with past-due accounts for tuition three times a year. In October, February and June, one person from the office called every at-risk student – sometimes totaling as many as 400 at each of those points. If they did not answer or respond within a certain time frame, their account was sent to a collection agency. If the student did answer, the Purdue staffer decided whether to set up a payment plan or give the student another month to pay (the hold threshold is $1,000).
Payment plans were manually set up in Word and emailed to students to physically sign and return. While the list of overdue accounts and plans was monitored closely every month by staff, the manual nature of this process made it easy for students to ignore, to brush off as too inconvenient, or to continue to request grace periods. The result? Only 29 students signed up for payment plans for the academic year.
“Students do not always want to talk with someone. They prefer to do it all online if they can,” Lester said.
Solution: Automated alerts, online payment plans with Banner integration ease collections
Lester took on his current role overseeing account resolution in 2021, the same year Purdue University implemented Flywire to manage tuition payments for international students and digitize 529 disbursements.
Boosted by those successes, the department was eager to implement Flywire’s Collection Management offering, a project Lester would soon lead to drive more efficiency through automation. Lester recalled hearing about Collection Management at an Indiana Bursar’s conference years earlier, and walking away thinking “this is awesome.”
Purdue went live with Flywire’s Collection Management software, configuring it with its specific thresholds and parameters, in March 2024 to digitize and automate the past-due collection process. It pulled over account information housed in Ellucian Banner to automatically:
- Receive alerts about students who were about to default on their accounts.
- Send weekly notifications to students with past-due balances and options for flexible payment plans.
- Collect payments and feed transaction information directly back to Banner.
- Assign students to internal collectors after 76 days of non-action to work those accounts.
- Send accounts not on a payment plan after 107 days totaling $300 or more directly to outside collection agencies.
Results: More than 300 students back on track, more than $1 million in revenue recovered
Students love being able to see and directly manage payment plans online, as well as the flexibility in terms, according to Lester. Students are offered installment options based on how much they owe, with extended terms that put even very large balances within reach. The return on investment was nearly immediate with:
- Hundreds more students taking responsibility for their balance. In one year, payment plan usage skyrocketed from 29 plans to 327, including active and completed plans.
- More students paying in full. The default rate on payment plans is just 6.7%.
- Less debt going to collection agencies. The number of final demands issued is down 48%. That cuts expenses on collections agency placements and protects revenue that would otherwise be discounted when that account is placed.
- More revenue being recovered. More than $1 million in revenue that would otherwise be written-off has been saved.
- Staff able to manage more accounts with the same number of people. Lester and his colleagues can now better serve more students, and still reserve time to help guide students with more complex financial situations.
I can’t imagine how much extra work we’d have to be doing if we were still doing collections the old way. It's kind of a lifesaver. Our write-offs will go down because of Flywire."
