Introduction
At University of the Pacific, managing past-due student accounts was a highly manual job, and much of it fell to one person.
Laura Brasil, Student Business Services Lead, owned the university’s past-due account process. But the work involved far more than helping students resolve balances. It meant auditing accounts, coordinating outreach, preparing letters, tracking payment plans, and pulling colleagues away from their day-to-day work to make calls.
There were challenges on the student side, too. The university accepts checking and savings accounts directly, but not credit cards. And students with older balances could eventually lose access to the university portal altogether, making it harder to view their account and pay.
University of the Pacific needed a way to make resolving a balance easier for students without adding even more work for staff.
The challenge
Before Meadow, University of the Pacific worked past-due accounts largely in batches.
After each semester, Laura would run a report and audit every account on the list. Each round included a 10-day email and a 30-day final demand letter. If time allowed, she might add another email, while colleagues worked through a list of phone calls.
The process took significant time across the team. Preparing a large batch of letters could consume an entire workday, sometimes a day and a half, while outbound calls could occupy colleagues for a week.
“I’m the dedicated past-due individual in the office, and then I would say, ‘Hey, I need all of you guys to call this list in the next week.’ And that’s kind of what it was.”
Payment plans added another manual layer. The university could offer students with past-due balances a three-month plan, but Laura tracked those plans on paper in an accordion file, using calendar reminders each month to make sure payments were on schedule.
That three-month limit wasn’t always realistic for students with larger balances. And students who needed to pay by credit card had no option to do so through the university’s standard process.
Reaching former students could be difficult as well. Roughly half of University of the Pacific’s student population is international, meaning some students return home after leaving the university, change phone numbers, or stop monitoring the email addresses on file. Staff could send outreach, but unless a student responded, they had little visibility into whether it was reaching them.
The solution
What initially stood out to Laura about Meadow was an experience built around how students actually communicate and pay.
“I really liked that it was mobile first, especially since students nowadays are always on their phones. And I really liked the user interface as well.”
Meadow gave University of the Pacific a consistent outreach process across multiple touchpoints without requiring Laura to manage each step herself. It also gave the team visibility into opens, clicks, and payment activity, so they could finally see whether students were engaging with their communications.
For students, Meadow expanded the paths available to resolve a balance. They could pay by card or Apple Pay and choose more flexible payment plans when a three-month schedule wasn’t feasible.
Payment plan management moved out of Laura’s accordion file and into the Meadow dashboard, where she could see activity and progress in one place.
Implementation was straightforward, with regular communication between Meadow, the university’s IT team, and Student Business Services keeping the rollout on track.
The results
$500K+ in past-due balances, nine months in.
Since going live in January, University of the Pacific recovered more than $400,000 in past-due balances through Meadow. Another $100,000+ is scheduled to come in through dozens of active payment plans. That's more than $500,000 addressed in total, a return of more than 20x on the university's investment in Meadow.
Behind those dollars are 150+ students who have either paid their balance in full or are on a plan to get there, and with that, a path back to re-enrollment.
More time for higher-value work
The most immediate difference for Laura and her team was operational relief and quite literally weeks of combined time back for her team.
“That has been the biggest time saver for us — the outreach aspect of it. Now my team’s able to focus on other things rather than sitting here and calling these students for an entire week.”
Laura still logs into Meadow every day, but her role has shifted from executing every step of the process to watching what’s happening and using that information to guide decisions.
She can see payments come in, monitor engagement, and understand how accounts are moving — visibility she didn’t have when the process lived across reports, paper files, letters, and calls.
More ways for students to resolve balances
Laura had a hunch that expanding payment options would mean engaging more students in actually paying. She was right.
Laura estimates that roughly half of students paying through Meadow still use bank accounts, while the other half use card options the university couldn’t previously offer directly.
That matters when a student reaches out ready to resolve a balance but says a credit card is their only option. Instead of turning that student away from the university’s standard payment process, staff now have another path to offer. At the time of our conversation with Laura, nearly one third of their past-due students had made at least one payment toward resolution
Payment plans have seen traction, too. At the time of our conversation, 60 students, or 13% of their past due population had started or were actively enrolled in a past-due payment plan through Meadow, with an average payment period of 14.6 months.
For Laura, that’s 60 plans she no longer has to manage on paper. For students, it means more flexibility than the university’s previous three-month limit could provide.
Reaching students sooner
Meadow has also changed when University of the Pacific engages past-due students.
Instead of primarily reviewing accounts after each semester, Laura now pulls the report monthly. A student who withdraws and develops a balance can enter the outreach process within weeks rather than waiting months for the next review.
That gives the university a better chance of reaching students while they’re still connected to the institution and have contact information that’s up to date.
“We’re catching these past-due accounts sooner while the students are still checking their emails.”
Half as much referred to collections
The impact extends beyond workflow.
At the time of the interview, University of the Pacific had cut the dollar amount referred to traditional collections in half compared with the prior year.
Students now have more opportunities — and more ways — to resolve their balances before an account reaches that stage.
Why it matters
University of the Pacific didn’t need another tool that left staff responsible for doing all the work around it. It needed a process that could run consistently while giving students better ways to engage and pay.
With Meadow, Laura and her team have moved from manually managing every touchpoint to intervening where their attention matters most. The university has put more than $500,000 in past-due balances on a path to resolution in nine months. It's reaching students earlier, giving them more flexibility, and sending half as many dollars to collections, while giving staff meaningful time back.
“Our experience has honestly been outstanding. We’ve seen great results with it, and I love that you’re able to track the analytics with students actually opening communication. Our numbers have gone down significantly as well in terms of students we’ve sent to collections.”
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