University of Texas System · Higher Education · Austin, TX · 18 weeks
Financial aid disbursement process automated with AI
The University of Texas System manually processed financial aid disbursements across eight institutions, taking about 14 days each time. We developed an AI-driven automation system that cut the processing time to 36 hours and saved $1.7 million in annual labor costs.
Challenge
The financial aid office handled 180,000 disbursements yearly across eight institutions, each with different verification steps and workflows. The manual process took 14 days on average to complete, delaying funds for students. This delay created uncertainty that directly caused 600 fewer enrollments than expected.
Outcome
We cut disbursement processing from 14 days to 36 hours and slashed annual labor costs from $1.7 million to $280,000. By addressing financial aid uncertainty, we closed the enrollment yield gap by 4.1 percentage points, adding 740 students and $5.9 million in tuition revenue.
Results
- 14 days to 36 hrs Disbursement processing time
- $1.7M Annual processing labor saved
- 740 Additional enrolled students
- $5.9M Additional tuition revenue
Students were signing up without knowing if they could afford it, and waiting two weeks meant we lost a lot of them. Thinklytics helped us bring that down to about 36 hours, and the next year we enrolled 740 more students.