This is a guest blog from Blackbullion, a learning platform for students who want to get in control of their money.
With student financial issues being the number one threat to university campuses and student success, universities will survive by adopting a holistic approach to supporting student financial wellbeing as their superpower.
More and more student recruitment, outreach, marketing and admissions teams are making student financial wellbeing a crucial focus and integrating it with their activities. Why? Because student money is now the common denominator for key university success metrics:
- Retention: 129% annual increase in students dropping out because of financial distress. 70% of students have considered dropping out and nearly 2 in 5 gave rising living costs as the main reason
- Attainment: 56% of students have received a lower grade than expected because they were too hungry to study or concentrate
- Recruitment: 3rd year of falling interest in university, with 36% of prospects citing that living expenses would be too high
Forward-thinking providers are taking a critically important whole-institution approach to address these challenges head on, ensure students are supported at every touchpoint, and achieve success for both students and universities.
Five step approach:
- Access to financial education at every step of the student journey
Empower students with the money skills they need to succeed at each step of their HE journey. From accurately preparing for the cost of university life, to managing their money while studying and transitioning to post-university life.
- Money management tools
This could include support with budgeting, ways to help them understand their spending and personalised insights to make informed decisions about their money.
- Ease of finding and applying for additional funds
Providing one central place to signpost to, where students can find, and ideally apply for, every available fund, bursary, scholarship and award within the university. From hardship funding to department specific funds e.g. Open Day travel funds for prospective students managed by recruitment or outreach and admissions teams or interview travel cost and clothing funds from careers teams.
- A funding process that’s efficient for staff and students
A streamlined end-to-end process from student application through to staff making decisions and payments will ultimately get financial support to the students who need it as quickly as possible. This could be the difference between whether the student can continue their studies or not.
- Decision-making based on accurate data insights
Provide students with accurate, up-to-date information about the actual cost of university life. And use data to optimise your student support and ensure you’re reaching the students most at risk.
Free resources to help your students:
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- Learn about money: all students can create a free Blackbullion account on blackbullion.com to access learning pathways and articles to build essential money skills and confidence for life.
- Find and apply for more money: by creating a free Blackbullion account, students can access the Funding Hub – the UK’s largest hub of student support funds, scholarships and grants – to find and apply for extra money. They’ll find over £1 million in scholarships from our corporate partners (like Nationwide and Amazon). Many of these come with work experience and employment opportunities for the student.
- Manage money with confidence: All students can download the free Blackbullion Money Manager app from the App Store or Google Play Store. The first app built for students, it helps them create a realistic budget based on their spending and supports them in sticking to it to achieve their financial goals.
Get more resources to support you and your students straight to your inbox.
One university-wide solution to deliver a unified experience
We know you are increasingly having to do more with less and may be facing having fewer staff members overall, but we can help.
Student finance reaches every department that reaches students. Through the Blackbullion app, platform, insights and support, we provide all that is needed, by every team, at every student stage.
More than 50 universities already use Blackbullion as their not-so-secret weapon at the centre of their whole institution approach. With 275,000+ of their students using Blackbullion to learn about money, manage their money and apply for more money – over £25 million has been awarded to students to date.
Book a call to talk about how we can provide you with powerful insights, empower your students with life-changing money skills and opportunities, and transform how you manage funds and make payments. Or learn more here.
Your institution may already have access to our entire ecosystem of powerful solutions – get in touch on hello@blackbullion.com to check.
We’ll also be at the HELOA Annual Conference from the 15-17 January and would love to have you join us for our workshop session: How to work with external companies to deliver skills-focused outreach sessions. See you there!