How Low Tolerance for Waiting Is Impacting the College Shopping Experience

Gone are the days of flipping through catalogs that come out twice a year and late-night infomercials that yield weeks-long processing and shipping times. Even having to wait two days for my latest Amazon Prime impulse buy to arrive is two days too long. Today, we exist in a world driven by instant gratification and feedback support, thanks to the promise of two-hour delivery.

Shopping isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Instant access has shaped how we find our next date, to how we find our next binge-worthy show. The amount of time that consumers are willing to wait has been steadily declining to the point of near non-existence. After around 22 seconds of waiting people get frustrated that their media has not started to stream yet. We now measure acceptable wait times with seconds, minutes, and (maybe) hours instead of days, weeks, and months.

Low Tolerance for Waiting and Higher Education

This may not be such a big deal when it comes to swiping right on a match-making platform. However, the consequences can be more significant when we carry this trend through to the college shopping experience. When hundreds of thousands of students are preparing to commit to colleges across the nation, how long it takes to get answers and finalize how they will pay for college can impact their student experience and where they choose to enroll. The impact could be a top-choice institution falling further down their list.

In a recent survey of current and former college students, a clear trend was identified: Students are expecting the same response time and instant feedback when engaging with college financial aid offices as they are everywhere else. The only difference is that they are getting instant gratification elsewhere. When asked how long a student would wait for their first-choice school to process financial aid forms before thinking about enrolling elsewhere, 15% reported that they would begin to explore other options in two weeks or less. Extended to four weeks, 48% of respondents said they would consider enrolling at an alternative school. And when extended to eight weeks, 76% of students would think about enrolling someplace else.

Technology Can Reduce Review Time

In the forms and paperwork-driven world of financial aid, it is common for first-time students to turn in documents that can take weeks and weeks to review. Some colleges regularly communicate to students selected for verification—an audit-like process for some federal aid applicants—which can take 7-10 weeks to review. When college enrollment continues to slide, colleges need to do everything they can to retain students who have been admitted. Technology can help to reduce the paperwork review process. Institutions like Riverside City College and Texas A&M University report that they can process verification and file reviews in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks.

Students Won’t Wait When It Comes to Financial Aid Decisions

The urgency for students to solidify how they will pay for college gets exacerbated when facing financial changes. These changes in finances may come in the form of unemployment, or significantly reduced income that impacts their ability to pay for school. When questioned about how long a student would wait for an institution to process a reevaluation or appeal due to financial changes before considering a different school, 25% of students said they would wait fewer than two weeks. When extended to a month, nearly half of surveyed students said they would consider another school while waiting.

Delays in processing and frustration with the financing process do not just impact prospective students. 33% of enrolled students surveyed said they had considered dropping out of college because of how frustrating the process of paying for college was.

Eliminate Complexity and Cut Down on Wait Time

These statistics are alarming, but they also present us with an opportunity. Higher education can innovate with higher ed tech to improve student success. To take action, institutions need to evaluate current processes and cut through the complexity that has been created.

How to simplify processes:

• Eliminate cumbersome, repetitive, and time-consuming requirements that are unnecessary.
• Ask yourself why do we have the student submit this? And what happens if we no longer collect this information?

These two simple questions will allow you to eliminate steps. When simplification is partnered with highly personalized and automated interactions, cycle times, workloads, and financial friction can be significantly reduced.

 Learn more about how to alleviate financial friction for students.