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Nancy Taylor
University of Kentucky

Nancy Taylor

Assistant Director of Student Billing Services

Nancy Taylor, Assistant Director of Student Billing Services at the University of Kentucky (UK), describes herself as having ‘blue blood in her veins” and is an avid Wildcat fan. She is proud of UK’s basketball and football teams, but her pride really encompasses the entire university. She has many reasons to be proud of her employer and her alma mater. UK is the flagship university of the state of Kentucky. The school has an enrollment of over 27,000 students, and was established in 1865 as a land grant college. The mission of the University is "Teaching, Service, and Research,” and its goal is to become ranked in the top 20 of public research universities by the year 2020.

Nancy is one of the 27,000 students enrolled at UK and will receive her Masters of Science in Education as this article goes to press in May 2005. She will begin work on a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation immediately after receiving her master’s degree.

Nancy began her career at UK shortly after graduating from the university with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1980. She added, with a laugh, that she was hired by the student loan office, not because of her grasp of student loans, but because she could type. She has had several promotions over her career, and now her office oversees the administration of all campus-based student loans after they are awarded to the students. She and her staff of six provide loan counseling to the students and then handle repayment and collections activities when the loans go into repayment. She is also responsible for reporting activities, such as preparing the FISAP report. The school also has quite a few institutional programs with complicated guidelines and recently she began administering the Nurse Faculty Loan Program as well. In addition to supervising her staff, Nancy oversees the activities of three collection agencies, as well as interfacing with Campus Partners.

Her office has changed a great deal in the 24 years that she has worked there. At first the then entitled “Billing and Collections” office was cramped into one room. “It wasn’t very user friendly for the students. There were bars on the windows and a high counter,” Nancy said. On top of that, the office did not have computers. When she wanted to look up records, she had to consult the Student Loan Journal to check on payments and deferments. When it was time for registration, the entire staff would go to the coliseum to collect tuition payments directly from the students in a long drawn out process.

All that has changed over the years. Her office in now designed to be user-friendly and less intimidating for students, and her staff has had computers for many years. They now rely heavily on online services and other Web based products provided by Campus Partners, which has counted UK as a customer for almost 40 years.

Nancy is grateful for the help that Campus Partners provides. She is especially close to Sharon Cameron, our Audit and Compliance Specialist. “Even though Sharon and I have both changed job duties over the years, we always end up working together.” Recently she and Sharon have been tackling the Perkins funding crisis, which threatens the ability of many universities to meet the financial needs of their students. Nancy asked Campus Partners to produce borrower labels for her office, so they could send information about the threat to Perkins funding to their enrolled students. Many students took the initiative to send letters in support of Perkins to their Congressmen and Senators.
In 1991, Nancy helped found the Kentucky Association of Student Receivables Officers (KASRO), a professional association for Kentucky student receivables and loan administrators and has served as an officer for the organization. Through KASRO, she is also a member of COHEAO. With the help of these organizations, along with Sharon Cameron’s monthly updates, Nancy has been able to keep up with changes in Federal Regulations and the latest developments in the Perkins funding crisis.

In addition to her accomplishments at work, Nancy is the proud mother of a son, Mike, who attends Eastern Kentucky University. She also has a Jack Russell terrier named “Jack,” who keeps her company with his lively antics. She likes to read murder mysteries (“I don’t know what that says about me.”), and enjoys traveling. Through her job, she has traveled to California, Florida, and Washington, DC. She collects magnets as mementos of her travels and has quite a collection on her file cabinet. But, no matter where she goes, she is always ready to return to her old Kentucky home and her beloved “Cats.”