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Brenda Douglas
Elon University

Brenda Douglas

Assistant Bursar

The first thought that comes to mind after talking to Brenda Douglas, Assistant Bursar at Elon University is regret at not having discovered this private school located in Elon, NC previously. A cheerful, positive, and knowledgeable student loan professional, Brenda is very proud to be working at Elon and enjoys her job and working with the University’s students. With her enthusiasm and experience, it is no wonder that Elon has one of the lowest cohort default rates in the state of North Carolina and probably the nation.

Brenda’s description of the beauty of Elon University’s campus, which was founded in 1889, would be enough to entice any student to enroll.The campus’s landscaping abounding with flowering plants, ancient trees, and classical buildings earned it a ranking among the most beautiful campuses in the nation from the Princeton Review. Elon is a premier private liberal arts university which is nationally recognized for its academic excellence and high standards.
Elon can also be considered a visionary school because it realized the value of outsourcing at an early stage and contracted for student loan servicing with our company in July 1965. Since the company was the first in the nation to offer third party loan processing, Elon and the nine other schools that signed up that year for student loan servicing were true pioneers.

Brenda was not associated with the University at that time, but she still values the services offered by Campus Partners. Brenda handles multiple job functions so she must be able to depend on our company and the collection agencies that she works with for support. Her responsibilities include reconciling bank statements and accounts receivable associated with Perkins loans, collecting tuition payments, acting as the liaison for Student Government and Residence Life when additional collections are needed, and monitoring all Perkins loan collections activities.

Her satisfaction with Campus Partners goes back a long time. When she was first hired at Elon eight years ago, she learned a great deal about loan servicing from our staff. “Gaye Taylor was my first Customer Service Representative. Working with her was a wonderful benefit for me. No one else in my office knew much about Perkins Loans at the time because I was replacing the previous Perkins staff member. I also had to depend on Sharon Cameron a great deal. I could call Sharon and Gaye for any questions that I had, and they trained me well,” Brenda related.

Today, Debbie Fallin is her Customer Service Representative, and Brenda says she can continue to count on “always hearing a smiling voice when I call Campus Partners.” She also likes our processing system. “Other companies have shown me their systems, but I think ‘why complicate things?’ With System III, it is so easy to look up accounts and read the screens. It only takes a second to learn how to look up things. I am very concerned with giving borrowers the most accurate answers to their questions, so again System III comes in handy,“ Brenda remarked enthusiastically.

Brenda wants borrowers to know that they can depend on her to answer questions and help them with their accounts for the entire time that they are in repayment. Most recently she has been helping borrowers and their parents with loan consolidation requests as the scramble to consolidate escalated before the July 1 rate increase. “I wanted to make sure they understood the consolidation process and that they got the best rates available to them,” Brenda said.

Brenda also wants to make sure that her borrowers know how to handle their loans, which she seems to have accomplished as evidenced by the school’s default rate. When she took over the Perkins program, Elon’s default rate was 16 or 17 percent. Within a year, it was 13% and has continued to decline. Currently, her default rate is one percent. She likes being in a group of universities that includes Duke and Wake Forest (also a customer) with some of the lowest default rates in the nation.

As happy as Brenda is at Elon, it is not surprising that she enjoys spending her free time there. She can always count on seeing a good play or ball game at Elon or simply enjoying a walk through the campus and the botanical garden behind her office.

On a personal note, Brenda has been married 28 years to her husband, Gary, and the couple has two grown children. She enjoys “music that you can sing along with, books that make you cry, and movies that keep you guessing,” she explained. In short, Brenda participates fully in life, sharing her enthusiasm and knowledge and is not afraid to relate to others in an honest and caring manner. She has found the blueprint for success in her personal and professional life, and enriches the lives of her family, coworkers, and students.