One of the side effects of the recent focus on creating a more transparent and distant relationship between student loan lenders and institutions of higher education is that the cost to deliver financial aid at those institutions will rise. Under the previous set of regulations, lenders were able to provide services such as call center support, printing financial aid materials, and conducting exit and entrance interviews for schools. Taking on all of those activities themselves would have cost schools a considerable sum.

Schools are now faced with these new set of costs in delivering aid, from printing those glossy brochures to maintaining - if they choose to - a preferred lender list on an annual basis. Unless schools can figure out how to deliver aid in a more cost effective way, these new expenses will ultimately reduce the aid available to students.

More student-focused financial aid software solutions are a start. Most financial aid software systems today focus on the processing side of aid delivery - they are more worried about sending loan information from point A to point B than about whether the loan is understood by the borrower or was even necessary in the first place. The student communication side of the interaction is entirely missing from the equation.

Most modern financial aid management systems do an adequate job of presenting some basic data, but those same systems do a horrible job of actually communicating with the student. The typical financial aid software system can show the student his or her Stafford Loan amount, but as far as communicating what a Stafford Loan actually is and how it works, forget it. That communication is done through paper, over the phone, or face-to-face in aid offices. In some cases, that is the way it should be done, with a personal interaction, but for 80 to 90 percent of the student population served by financial aid offices, that face-to-face interaction is unnecessary, expensive and unwanted by the student.

This lack of an efficient self-service financial aid delivery portal leads to what we see happening in most of the aid offices we visit: stressed out and overworked staff, long lines, unhappy students and parents and a very expensive financial aid delivery process. But there are solutions out there that can help (ok, yes, ours happens to be an example). One of our Payment Planner customers received 1,000 fewer phone calls in a single month compared with the same month in the year prior to their implementation. With the cost at somewhere between $8 and $10 per phone call to handle internally, those sums can rise very quickly over an entire year. We are going to publish a lot of new information regarding these costs and how to control them over the next few months, so keep an eye on this space.