Back-to-school season brings financial aid back to students and parents’ minds. A new collaboration between Highline College and Amazon Web Services (AWS) created a tool that helps address systemic barriers to education by making services more transparent, efficient, and simple for learners and staff.
Approximately 84 percent of first-time, first-year undergraduate students receive financial aid in some form, according to the Education Data Initiative. Many higher education leaders are focused on supporting equitable access to post-secondary education.
Located south of Seattle in the suburb of Des Moines, Highline College is proud not only for being the oldest community college in King County but also for being the most diverse community college in the state and one of the most diverse education institutions in the entire United States. The College, which counts with 25 percent of its 13,000 students coming from refugee and immigrant families, offers them rather popular English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes.
Recently, Highline College and long-term partner Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced the creation of a novel automated cloud-based tool to address systemic barriers to education by making financial aid services more transparent, secure, and simple to better manage financial aid inquiries.
Over the past years, Highline College’s financial aid department experienced a large number of calls, emails, and visits from students who needed updated information of the status of their financial aid packages. The department was fielding an average of 250 to 300 contacts per week. This number quadrupled during peak periods of the years when certain deadlines were due. “We were looking for a way to turn around the process,” said Corinne Soltis, Director of Financial Aid at Highline. “What we needed was a program or a tool that both reduced the load on staff and improved the process for the students,” she said.
The goal was achieved. AWS cloud technology reduced the manual burden on Highline’s financial department aid by 75 percent and made it much easier for students to access and track their financial aid information. “We had good security and redundancy happening in the cloud, but we hadn’t taken full advantage of more modern AWS Cloud tools," said Tim Wrye, Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Executive Director of IT Services at Highline College.
The new automated cloud-based tool for the financial aid department was a step forward to start leveraging some of the automation services on the AWS toolbox to meet the mission of the college. Wrye took the direction of the project and AWS brought in a specialized acceleration team which worked alongside the Highline team to build and deploy the initial pilot of the financial aid tracking tool in just six weeks.
Highline College Application Developer Matthew Fiebig explained how the AWS team was able to walk into a very traditional environment for application development at the college and help modernize both the technical and logistical aspects of it. “Honestly, the support from AWS has been outstanding,” he said. “They dragged us by our bootstraps into the cloud era. They were responsive to our requests for training, and provided us with architects that made it easy to understand the technologies we were adopting.”
The new AWS cloud-based tool can communicate with students via text and email when the status of their aid application changes. In addition, it displays status information not previously available to students directly and helps explain what that status means, contextualizing information in clear, learner-friendly language providing students with links that take them directly to action items. “Students simply log into the tool using their myHighline account. From there, they can check the status of their financial aid package, receive instructions if action is needed, or be assured that everything is in order and all they have to do is wait to have their application processed,” said Wrye, who loves the simplicity of the tracking tool.
The Highline financial aid department team quickly appreciated the benefits the tool brought them. This year, they were finished with initial reviews by May, saving them four months of time from previous years. In the past, they needed 120 days to fully process a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. The adoption of the new tool has cut that time into half. As the department continues to integrate the tool more seamlessly into its day-to-day operations, they expect these times to improve even further. The time saved is then used to help students with more complex issues rather than just providing basic information.
For other articles on partnerships with AWS, see:
Cal State Fullerton Offers Tech Skills to Adult Learners
Improving the Student Experience: Kim Majerus, VP, AWS
Amazon Web Services Partners with the Tennessee Board of Regents