Payment plan options for students

Turning on the payment plan option for students is not as simple as it seems on the surface. There no switch that gets flipped on or off each term, and, like much in life, there are many processes and decisions that need to happen before making these options available to students.
So, how does it work?

First, the Board of Regents need to set and approve tuition rates, which are typically approved during their June meeting. However, this presumes that the Minnesota State Legislature has already determined the University's state allocation. The Regents can’t set tuition rates before this allocation is determined, because tuition rate increases (or freezes) are tied directly to legislative decisions.

After the rates are set it takes three to four weeks for Student Finance-Information Technology to set up tuition and fees in PeopleSoft and another week to test whether or not it's working correctly. Behind the scenes, the Office of Student Finance (OSF) implements multiple payment plans for students with the hope that eventually the best single-plan option can be selected. Once the PeopleSoft tuition and fees are verified, OSF can begin to run tuition calculations for students who have enrolled for the upcoming term. After the tuition calculations have run, the delivered version of PeopleSoft's payment plan can be 'turned on' allowing students to select and enroll in the payment plan​.

However, OSF wants to avoid unnecessarily assessing students the $20 enrollment fee if their financial aid would cover ​all of ​their tuition and fees. For that reason, it's important that the payment plan not be available for students until after​ the first major​ financial aid disbursement date. This is especially true this term, because this is the first time students aren’t automatically enrolled in the payment plan option and need to proactively enroll themselves. Aid is disbursed to students approximately ten days before the start of the semester, so the payment plan will become available in the very short window between disbursement and the start of the semester.