Every once in a while someone comes along and gives you a new way to look at an old problem - and that new way can change everything.

The challenge of getting students to pay their bills at all - never mind on time - is a challenge that has been persistent over time and across schools.  Get a group of Bursars or Directors of Student Financial Services together and you will hear the complaints.  Because the truth is - it is just so hard to do.

And it is made even harder because we are sometimes trying to fix a problem we don’t fully understand.  We know that students pay late but until we know why - at the individual and collective level - we are unlikely to get them to pay on time. 

Anthony Morrone, AVP of Student Financial Services at Nevada State University shared a framework at NACUBO’s Student Financial Services conference that addressed this head-on and gave all of us a new way to look at the problem - and new ways to solve it.. 

According to Anthony, when students have a past due balance, the typical response is to send multiple reminders about the approaching or missed payment due date. Despite this, many students still fail to pay on time. The initial reaction might be to question the student's motivation, assuming they don’t care or don’t want to pay. This assumption is known as the "fundamental attribution error," where we are more forgiving of ourselves than others when a gap between expectations and reality occurs.

However, the book Crucial Accountability provides a framework to assess the influences on a person’s behavior beyond personal motivation. By understanding these influences, we can address the real reasons behind students' failure to pay on time.

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Intrigued? In this framework, Anthony digs deeper into each of the six categories with recommendations for each.  Download it here.

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