The University of Texas at Austin Transforms the Financial Aid Experience with Student Financial Planning

Sierra-Cedar worked with the University of Texas at Austin to replace its in-house financial aid system with Oracle Student Financial Planning (SFP). The university was able to achieve valuable immediate and long-term benefits post-migration, including:

Key Project Highlights:

  • Faster and more efficient aid processing. SFP’s automation and scalability enabled the University to disburse over $199 million in financial aid within several days. Streamlined departmental scholarship processing allowed for the automated removal of departmental scholarship holds from up to 10,000 aid packages, eliminating the need for staff to manually review and update aid packages, achieving faster aid delivery to students.
  • Streamlined compliance. UT Austin can now rely on Oracle to release regulatory updates, reducing the institutional risks and costs associated with implementing yearly changes to its legacy system.
  • More agility to innovate and roll out strategic initiatives. New aid initiatives can be deployed quickly, taking advantage of corporate scholarship funding opportunities and responding to special funding requests from senior leadership.
  • Increased resilience. UT Austin delivered aid to students much more quickly than in past years despite the compressed timeline and unpredictable delays related to the Department of Education’s FAFSA Simplification rollout.
  • Enhanced peer support and collaboration. As part of the growing SFP user community, UT Austin benefits from knowledgeable peers at other institutions who provide insights and act as a sounding board. UT Austin also provides input to Oracle’s development team to help shape the product’s future.