College is basically a never-ending stream of Venmo requests. Your roommate wants your share of the utilities. Your friend wants half of an Uber. Someone wants $12 for an a cappella show you never really planned to attend.
Now Venmo wants to handle something a little bigger: your tuition bill.
PayPal, Venmo’s parent company, announced Wednesday that students and families can now use Venmo and PayPal to pay tuition at participating colleges and universities.
The companies are partnering with education payment platforms Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce, and TouchNet. Together, those platforms serve thousands of colleges and universities, giving schools another way to let students and families pay their tuition.
So yes, you can now make one of the largest payments of your life from the same app where you occasionally discover that someone from high school just paid for “leaf emoji, fire emoji, smoke emoji,” whatever that means.
You might open Venmo because a friend covered your latte, scroll around for a minute, and suddenly remember that you still owe your college several thousand dollars.
Nelnet Campus Commerce president Jackie Strohbehn framed the move as a way to make tuition payments more flexible and less painful for students and families.
“For students and families, tuition is the single biggest financial decision they’ll navigate for higher education,” Strohbehn said in a statement. “Every payment option we add, including PayPal and Venmo, is about meeting them at that moment with more flexibility and less friction, so affordability isn’t a barrier to staying enrolled.”
Finally, someone said it.
When an 18-year-old earning $10 an hour at the campus library stares down a five-figure tuition bill, what they really need is a slightly more convenient way to hand over the money.
Kids today have it easy. We had to rack up student debt through unfamiliar payment portals with confusing passwords and questionable user interfaces. Now students can drain their bank accounts from the familiar comfort of Venmo or PayPal.
TouchNet president Jeremy Loch described the partnership as an integration that lets institutions “broaden choice and create a more frictionless payment experience for students and families.”
And that is the real dream of modern higher education: not lower tuition, apparently, but a smoother checkout experience.
At least when the bill arrives, students can pay it from the same app they use to split a pizza.
