- Florida Institute of Technology introduces cross-border payments system for tuition
- Education institution teams up with Western Union
According to recent estimates, approximately 4.7 million students studied abroad in 2017, an increase of over 100% compared with 2001.
While the number of international university students has increased steadily and significantly over the past 15 years, the difficulties they face are still the same. Language barriers, cultural differences, travel, documentation and more all present challenges for students who choose to study far from home.
Financial headaches can also cause turmoil for international students. Tuition payments need to be made on time and in the proper currency to prevent disruptions in student attendance. Even in the US, where more than one million students come to study abroad each year, these financial issues can be a stumbling block for many international students and their families.
One US school has managed to make the entire process much easier for international students, though.
According to the US News and World Report, Florida Institute of Technology had the highest international student enrollment of any American college or university during the 2016-2017 school year. Roughly 33% of Florida Tech's student body hails from overseas, and the school has worked hard to make financial transactions easier for its international students.
With students from more than 110 countries all over the globe, Florida Tech needed a strong, streamlined service that could handle a high volume of international payments. The university partnered with Western Union to create a portal that students and their families could use to transfer money from banks in their home countries to the school, ensuring payments arrived accurately and on time.
Students can use the portal to make tuition payments in their native currency, and the system also assists the university with currency exchanges and account reconciliation. Each transaction is clearly marked, so officials know where to assign each payment. This helps prevent attendance interruptions that can sometimes be caused by problems with late or missing tuition payments.
Officials at Florida Tech note that many international students sometimes have difficulty making cross-border payments. Many countries — like China, India, and some Latin American nations — set caps on the amount of money people can move out of the country at once or annually. This means that international students must provide documentation that specifies where they are enrolled and the cost of their tuition payments in order to work around these restrictions.
In some cases, an international student may be sponsored by the government of his or her native country, so tuition payments come from a foreign embassy, rather than a student's family. Again, problems with paperwork can delay or interrupt a student's education.
Florida Tech works with parents and government sponsors of international students to submit the necessary paperwork and to create payment plans that ensure students can continue to attend classes without disruption. Florida Tech's system has also made it possible for those international payments to be made in installments via credit card or wire transfer.
With higher education tuition costs rising along with international student enrollment numbers, Florida Tech's money transfers system could become a model for college and universities across the US and abroad.
