Why are we in higher education, we want to help the students to ultimately graduate, right? If they have a huge outstanding balance, they may not be able to continue their education, they may have to stop out for a few months, semesters or even worse, not return. 
Welcome to Focus, a podcast dedicated to the business of Higher Education. I'm your host, Heather Richmond. And we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher learning institutions. In this episode, I spoke with Cheryl Freisenhahn from the University of Texas at Dallas, on the university's refund policy, and how they now offer tuition insurance from Grad Guard to help students protect their investment in higher education. Hi, Cheryl, I'm so excited to have you join me today.
Hi, yes, I'm very excited to join you guys today, too.
That's wonderful. You know, you and I go way back. But can you give our audience just a little overview of your experience in higher education?
Sure, I will tell you that I celebrated 25 years with UT Dallas last April. And my career and sponsored projects, whoever, you know, there was an opportunity to go over to the bursar office 20 years ago, and I jumped on it. And I've really enjoyed it. I enjoy working with the students. And so I've been leading the bursar office, you know, for the last 18 years. It's been great.
That's been awesome. I know that I always enjoy seeing you at the trade shows and picking your brain and get to know a little bit about you and what's going on there. Well, I definitely want to get into your tuition insurance program. But first, you just tell us a little bit about the University of Texas at Dallas.
Certainly, I can say we have continued to grow, we actually exceeded over 31,000 student enrollment this past fall. Actually, we’re located just north of Dallas in Richardson, but what we're really known for is our chess game. We've been number one in the US on our chess, we're so big on chess, we actually have a life sized chess board on our main campus, you know, and on the main strip of our main campus.
Wow, that's so cool. Well, it sounds like you're the perfect person to be there working with students and student finance. So can you just tell a little bit about your approach to managing student finance? And how do you take care of those students to ensuring they really know what's going on?
Well, like everybody else, you know, our focus is to assist our students, but I'm really keeping them as informed as possible. Yeah, I think the more informed the student is, the better decisions that they can make. And so that's really my focus. And of course, to provide them with efficient tools to facilitate payments and to get their questions answered. But what I'm really big on is also creating partnerships all over campus. So that way, we can collaboratively assist our students with any various needs or concerns, that we we’re not just saying, oh, you can try to check in with this other department, but send them directly to the person and have a nice smooth transition for the students. To me, that way, there's no one dropping the ball with the students.
Now, that's great. And like you said, really, that education and keeping them informed all the different policies and what to do just makes it a better student experience all the way around. And so I know probably one of those is understanding what the refund policy is. And so how do you just ensure that they understand that refund mandate, especially from the state school perspective?
Well, obviously a state mandated refund policy, it is huge, because it can be very, very expensive for students if they wind up withdrawing. And then of course, they're not earning any credits associated with it. But I do make a point of addressing at all of our orientations, we send emails to our students to explain the refund policy. And of course, you know, spring 2022, we added the consent manager through the bill payments suite for students to acknowledge the state mandated refund policy. And of course, we do have a couple of web pages dedicated to the refund policy and what the scenario would look like if they dropped one class, if they dropped all the classes and the timing of when that would happen. But invariably, we always have students that say ‘I didn't know’, even though we make efforts to try to educate them.
Yeah, you have to actually read it. You could put it all the different places, but read it and understand it. Well, I know that you now offer tuition insurance to students, but before you have that's a recent offering, how did you handle appeals that students had, you know, really before they were able to purchase this tuition insurance plan?
Sure. So we had a committee that was made up of three different areas, I represent from the Financial Aid Office, the registrar's office, and the bursar office and collaboratively we reviewed any tuition appeals, we would require the students who submit appeal and the supporting documentation for that said appeal. And so we would review them and make a determination whether or not we would approve the appeal or deny the appeal. Now, an approved appeal would be that, okay, the student met with medical reasons that took place during that term, and therefore withdrew from all of their classes. And we would offer the student a one-time exception, so we would go ahead and make an exception to the steady state mandated refund policy and remove all their tuition fee charges. And if they had paid in full of course refund the student or it may just be removing the balance for the tuition charges. Like I said, it was a one-time appeal. So if it was a situation where a student down the road a couple of semesters later, wind up having to withdraw again, we would not offer them another appeal. It was really one time only exception. So yeah, and let's face it, there's times where you have a medical condition that maybe it can recur, like I mentioned, with mental health, you may have medications that are helping you and you're doing fine. And suddenly, there's little tweak, and it's not working as it once was. And so we were not able to offer that student yet another appeal. So it was difficult for the students. And of course, prior to the spring 2020, we’d been reviewing a good 20 appeals per month and approving about 10 of those per month. So there was a lot of appeals.
That sounds like a lot and just all the different offices too it sounds really time consuming. So you know, what kind of time commitment were you spending on all these appeals?
That's true administratively amongst the four of us that were really involved, because it was three offices. But there was also a person on my team that was coordinating all these appeals. And so it would take a good six hours on a monthly basis between the four people that were involved. And of course, it wasn't just the workload that's associated with it. You care about the students, you care about the situation, you're reading about the circumstances behind their appeal, and some were just heartbreaking. So it could be emotionally tough and draining. And its toll on us just to go through these appeals and make decisions on people's lives. So you had to be mentally tough to be able to actually just go through the process.
I bet, hearing all those stories, that's heartbreaking. Beyond all the time commitment there. Obviously, if you're giving these one-time exceptions, that's probably a lot of money. How much did that really add up to that you were doing each year?
Well, as I mentioned, we would review around 20 appeals a month, and we would grant about 10 of them. And on average, you know, tuition for that student would be around $8,000. Okay, it's $80,000 month and times 12. So you're now heading up closer to a million dollars on an annual basis, you know, that we were writing off because we wanted to extend those students goodwill, you know, for their extenuating circumstances.
Wow, that's a lot of money. And I know everybody in higher ed, especially, you know, you want to be able to help those students and really help them progress. But you know, sometimes when you look at the time and the cost, it's really kind of tough to kind of figure out how do you keep going?
Absolutely, we want to do right by them. But it does put the university in a bit of a tough spot.
Yeah, sure does. So now let's talk about how you transitioned and you really helped us solve for this problem. Can you talk a little bit about your new tuition insurance program?
Certainly. So I've actually been interested in offering tuition insurance for quite a few years now. I have some issues with trying to get approval, but ultimately, we did finally get approval to be able to offer tuition insurance, I thought it was a really wonderful opportunity, because there's no cost to university. You know, when I really sat down with the representative from Grad Guard, what we did is we talked about all the different scenarios. They were offering a student reimbursement for situations that we weren't even offering. So I told you, we would do a one-time appeal. Well, this is not a situation for them. If that student winds up having a flare up for medical reasons, and they were able to document it, they would be able to file a claim, for that particular situation yet again, where we would not do that. They also offered claims for things that we would not offer, so I felt that it was like okay, why not? Why not try to partner with Grad Guard to offer tuition insurance? It sounds like a really good opportunity for the student. When we offered tuition appeals, we were only doing that for the tuition itself. Other types of expenses that student would still be responsible for, housing charges, meal plan that type of thing. But anyway, so we were able to start offering it for the spring 2022 term. And I’ve got to tell you, it's been really nice because we have been able to incorporate it within the TouchNet environment, its ready made, and it’s just a little bit of setup in the grand scheme of things. Now with the consent manager and presenting the financial responsibility agreement. It to me, it's another opportunity to push the refund policy out to our students. And for them to know that this is something that they have available to them an opportunity to enroll into tuition insurance. I really love this offering for our students.
Yeah, and especially like you said, it being embedded in when they're already in bill payment, and they're looking to see, what do I owe, and the consent manager coming up and saying, are you aware this is the refund policy, and after this amount of time, then you don't get a refund back? But hey, do you want to enroll in tuition insurance for a pretty small amount, that's probably a really great user experience?
Exactly. Because remember, it's all about the communication, I really tried to make sure that our students had the kind of communication, are made aware of things that are available to them.
That's right. And so it sounds like so far, the adoptions going pretty good.
The first semester, we offered again, it was spring 2022. And we had 178 students, you know, out of around 27,000 enrollment, and but again, it was brand new, we hadn't even done any real communication beforehand. And you had a nice job for fall 2022, we had 682 students or authorized users, because that's another thing I failed to mention is the authorized user, can purchase the tuition insurance for their students. And then this particular spring, right now we have 416. So it's still a jump from the prior spring, but it's down from fall. I feel that we'll get there. But I think this is going to take a lot more communication and really just getting the word out there.
Yeah, what do you think? Is it just a matter even understanding what does tuition insurance mean? Maybe a little communication on that? 
I have to agree, I think it is a matter of them understanding what it means. So I can tell you that we sent out email communications to inform our students of the offering. And we had some students think it was spam, or that there's something that was unscrupulous, if you will. But I think it’s a matter of getting them to understand. You know, I'm 20 years old, I'm invincible I can do anything, nothing bad is going to happen. They're going to think along those lines, they're not going to think along the lines of, it's really no different than car insurance or renters insurance. It's the parents, its authorized users that are going to appreciate, you know, what this means and what the offering is. And again, we have a fair number of scholarship recipients. So the scholarship recipients aren't thinking about if something happened to them because they're thinking the tuition is already covered. You know, that also means that I have used a semester worth of scholarship that is no longer going to be offered to me and available to me for a future semester. I think it's just a matter of really trying to focus on different communications, I'm working to partner with other offices. I'm thinking our Student Accessibility department, since they work with students that would really be a target audience. What I mean by that, students that are more likely to have or experience some sort of issue where they may have to withdraw from all of their classes. 
That’s a really good idea to like get those targeted groups and educating based upon that particular type of student body and how those can be beneficial. That's genius.
Well, we'll see how it goes. I haven't has a conversation with them yet. But I'm bound and determined to really get our students to understand, at least to make an informed decision, and not just throw this away. Like, I don't know what this means, I'm not going to research this and see what it means. I think it's important, at least that if they don't want the insurance, that they understand what it is they're saying no to, or that they're disregarding something. What am I disregarding?
Exactly? And like you said, in terms of the percentage, I mean, it's a pretty small amount to cover your entire tuition.
Oh, yes. I mean, for our student body and our tuition rates and everything. It's $110 a semester for up to $10,000 worth of insurance coverage. $110. On average, a student's tuition is going to be $8,000. I know I was a poor struggling college student myself at one time, but I think $110 versus $8,000, I would have purchased the insurance to make sure that I was covered.
Exactly, because out of pocket 110 versus 8000, depending on something happens, it's quite significant.
Exactly, that's a huge balance. Because, let's take it a step further, if the student does wind up having to withdraw and everything, they're still responsible for that full amount, they may not have paid for everything, they may have relied on financial aid to cover the tuition, that aid is going to be removed. And so now they've got this huge balance, if they had purchased tuition insurance and of course, we're talking about for a claim that would have been approved some sort of medical reasons. Now, they can file the claim and they can be fully reimbursed. But for the university, if the student hasn't paid for all those tuition fees yet, the benefit to the university is that when the claim is approved, they will pay the university first, and then if there's anything left that the student had paid, the student will then be paid that amount, so the university has an opportunity to be fully reimbursed for that claim before the student will be for that claim. 
Wow, that's really important to understand that because I'm sure there's a lot of lost dollars from if the student withdraws, they're still responsible, but they may not have the money to do it, or may go to collections. And by time you get it back from collections, you're getting pennies on the dollar. That's amazing.
Well, that's very true. And the thing is, let's face it, why are we in higher education, we want to help the students to ultimately graduate. Well, if they have a huge outstanding balance, they may not be able to continue their education, they may have to stop out for a few semesters or even worse, not return. And this, to me is an opportunity for the students to be able to continue their education and to complete their degree without an issue. So just that peace of mind, I just think it's really worth it.
Right, the peace of mind alone is absolutely worth it. While your numbers are increasing as there's more awareness, but it seems like those who really need it, who may have done and a claim and you had to do an appeal. That's reducing, I believe what we talked about. So how has this really impacted the issues that you were seeing? How many people are coming for an appeal to you now?
Well, we still have students that are asking for an appeal. And so that's a different story. But now it's a huge difference for us, because before we offered tuition insurance, again, 20 appeals, 10 approved a month. But we offer tuition insurance, and we make a point of making sure we're sending communication with the students. Plus we have the added benefit of the consent manager recording showing that the students, you have declined that opportunity. We don't offer tuition appeals, really to any of our students, with the exception of two reasons. We can appreciate the student may not want to cover themselves, because again, they think that they're invincible. But if the student did experience the death of an immediate family member, you may not have considered that at all. And none of us had the heart to tell the student that we're not going to grant them a tuition appeal when they have just experienced a loss of an immediate family. We will grant that type of appeal. So in the year of 2022, the calendar year 2022, we only granted two appeals, the whole year. And when you consider we were granting 120 appeals. Do the math. And so it's been a huge difference for us. And I'm not going to tell you that from a just a caring perspective, that it isn't still hard to tell the student no. It is easier to tell the student no, because of the fact that we did offer you this opportunity. And by the same token, we do need to make sure that we are treating all of our students fairly and equitably. Is it fair for us to grant and appeal to someone who chose not to purchase the insurance? Or the student that did choose to protect their investment into their tuition and they purchased insurance, right? That's sending a mixed message. Now why even bother? Why should that student have even purchased the insurance? You have to be tough, you have to hold students accountable. But by the same token, that's how life is. I think representative of higher education is not just making sure they pay for tuition and fees and so forth. It's making them more responsible, and they are going to be held accountable for their actions whether they like it or not, that's just life. 
That's right. They're going to school both for the book smarts, and the life smarts, and that's where you get to come in and teach the financial responsibility. And hey, if you didn't have car insurance, and you got into a wreck and it got totaled, they're not going to say, oh, we'll go ahead and give you a car after all.
Right, right. I think if we really tried to focus on putting that into the relationship, making them more relatable, see why'd you have the insurance for your car? Now? Do you think you can do it for your tuition? I'll get there. I'm determined.
Oh, I believe that you will. And I think you've already made huge strides in progress, just in the short amount of time that you've had the tuition protection program. And so it's probably a little too early, I think. But I mean, you said earlier, one of the other pieces, is that if they have this huge balance, it will be hard for them to re-enroll. What do you think about having this new approach with the tuition protection to be able to have them actually come back? Once whatever has happened has subsided?
Well, we did get some of our response, I was asking Grad Guard about our number of claims and everything. And I told you, we don't have the hugest adoption of this yet. I mean, just you know, almost 1300 students overall. But we've had 10 claims that were filed and seven that were approved, you know, last calendar year. So I guess where I'm going with that is that of the students that purchase, there was still not a whole lot that needed to and I'm thrilled about that. And I think more the adoption and everything, we're going to see more of those claims but I think as far as the students are concerned, and knowing what they have available to them, it's just working with them and understanding that they do have an opportunity to protect themselves and not be saddled with a huge balance that they're not going to be able to overcome.
And be able to do it more than once. Right? I mean, before you have the one appeal.
Yeah, I know I touched on this, but I really felt for the students that, have some sort of medical condition that could crop up again. And it really pleases me to no end that the students are now offered an opportunity, a peace of mind to enroll in tuition insurance each term and everything, and now it's not a matter of them having to make a decision. Okay, how do I feel right now? Do I feel like I could get through this term, and not have to take a roll of the dice? Now they can go on and continue their education with that peace of mind of knowing that they would be covered. I have a lot of admiration for the student that is determined they want to complete their education, despite having medical conditions that could crop up and force them to withdraw. No one should guard an opportunity to complete their education because of their medical reasons. So this to me is a wonderful opportunity for those students. 
It really is. It sounds like such a win win for the school, too. And so for our listeners out there thinking I need to get implemented using Grad Guard, can you tell us a little bit about your experience on the implementation process?
Absolutely. So I was told when I was having the discussions, it's a really easy implementation, Cheryl, really it's very easy. And I'm sure other people out there have been told that by vendors, and when you got into it, it was like, no, this is not as easy as you said it was going to be. I'm here to tell you, it really, really was as simple as advertised. No one is more shocked than myself. And this has nothing to do with TouchNet and nothing to do with Grad Guard, just experience with any type of implementation. But I will tell you that we signed the contract with Grad Guard on November 5 of 2021. And we were live by December 2 of 2021. So that we could start off right when we went live with our tuition fee tables, and students could start to go ahead and enroll in the tuition insurance. That's I mean, it was really nothing. And as far as having my questions answered, very timely responses. So any questions I had, I had responses later that day, or by the next morning, it was very quick. I would get responses, any little hiccups that we had with anything. You know, so I was very, very pleased by that customer service, and everything that we did, every question I had, it was as if they had nothing more to do and that we were their focus. That is great because you want that type of partnership when you're trying to implement something and get something ready for a new term.
Absolutely. And I know you've implemented a thing or two in your career.
I can’t say enough about the folks at both Grad Guard and TouchNet, they made the whole process very, very easy.
That's wonderful. And again, in terms of because of our integration and really having Grad Guard embedded, it's a feature within bill payment that is just a matter of getting that enabled, right?
Yes, so all of it was just some setup, honestly. A little setup of the of the consent manager. And now we happen to be a PeopleSoft school. I'm just throwing it out there. Because we have the integration between TouchNet and PeopleSoft. And TouchNet understands and recognizes what are known as service indicators, i.e. holes. So for universities, you will need to make some decisions on what it is that you want to implement. For instance, if you are implementing the Grad Guard, they will offer tuition insurance to any student. Personally, I'm more focused on students that were actually enrolled for the term, you know, so I can tell you that the consent manager will only open up for a student that is actually enrolled, because then the refund policy and mandate will come into play. If a student is logging into the system and they're not enrolled, then that refund policy is not shown. You know, why even look at that? So I wanted to make a point of focusing on the students that were enrolled, but because of that, and because there's the delivered setup, it was just a matter of doing the setup of that new service indicator, and updating the bill payment suite with that information. And so now, only the students that I have identified as enrolled will see that consent manager. Of course, develop your communication plan, because, I'm wanting to make sure that we had communications ready to send to students. And there's some things that I still want to do that I haven't done yet. And, of course, it’s a matter of educating my own team. So that way, if students were calling or emailing and asking about this, they would be able to answer your questions and explain, intelligently what this meant. Like I said, we did have a few students was like, what is this for? Is this spam?
Well, that's a good point, though, is to make sure that if you do get those questions that you have your team equipped to answer them. That's wonderful. I think you've given some great advice and some great success stories of being able to offer tuition protection for their students. So thank you so much. Any other advice or anything you'd like to share?
I would just have to say that for any schools that have not added tuition insurance as an option for their students, I would just highly recommend it. It doesn’t cost you anything. And you're giving your students an opportunity to protect their investment in their higher education. It's just a really, really nice offering.
Thank you so much, Cheryl for spending some time with me today, and all of your experiences to really improving financial literacy and advocating for your students to protect their investment. Thank you so much. 
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Focus. Don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date on the business of higher education. For more information, check us out at TouchNet.com.