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College offices to merge into new Student Financial Services branch
Bursar,
Financial Aid and Cashier Offices combine efforts to reduce travel for
students
By Neda
Simeonova
News Editor
Come November, students will no longer have to run from floor to floor
when it comes to paying their tuition.
Columbia's plan to take the existing Bursar and
Financial Aid and Cashier offices and combine them into a single unit
called the Office of Student Financial Services is an effort to better
serve the increasing student population's financial needs.
Currently the Office of Student Financial Services
is under development; the merge will take place at the beginning of November.
Primarily the new office will be placed on the
third floor at 600 S. Michigan Ave. where the Financial Aid Office is
currently located. The Cashier's office will maintain its present location
on the fifth floor, with the hope of a larger space on the third floor
in the future.
"Dr. Warrick Carter indicated that his vision
for the college is that it becomes the premier arts and communication
college in the world, which then trickles down a high level of expectation
for the functioning of the other elements of the college," said the
director of the Financial Aid Office John Olino.
Dialogues between Olino, Peter Radke (the head
of Columbia's Bursar Office), Mark Kelly (acting vice president of Student
Affairs) and Mike DeSalle (vice president of Finance), as well as visitations
to other college campuses, resulted in the decision to combine the offices.
As of now all three offices function separately.
The Bursar's Office maintains all student accounts and assists students
with their tuition, account statements, charges and payments. The Financial
Aid Office provides students with basic information about financial aid
eligibility, an outline of the various aid programs and their requirements,
the Columbia aid process and guidance for financial planning.
The Cashier is where students drop off and pick up payments
The
new office will improve these services by providing a one-stop shop for
all of a student's financial needs, questions and concerns.
"What we want to do is try to meet all of
the needs of the students in one visit to the office," Olino said.
Students will be able to meet face to face with
trained personnel who will be able to provide them with all of the necessary
information. This will eliminate the current time consuming hassle where
students find themselves schlepping from one office to another in order
to get their questions answered.
The structure of the new office required the
formation of a model, which created new positions within that office,
said Olino, who was charged with the responsibility of filling all of
the new positions.
The model of the office was approved by the U.S.
Department of Education. Olino believes that the model will improve the
efficiency of the new office.
"What
we've done here is that we'll have financial aid processors and financial
processors and their supervisors who will all function under a manager
processor," Olino said. Federal regulations require that "there
is a firewall between the functions of the financial aid awarding and
the dispersment of the funds." There will be people dealing directly
with the billing and others who will deal with the awarding of financial
aid.
The change in the structure of Columbia's financial
offices will not result in layoffs but in a staff increase. Olino thinks
that the office will have approximately six to nine more openings depending
on the budget.
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