Loan defaults? Not on her watch!

Dena Norris has a challenging job, but she does it with patience and with compassion. That’s why she’s been chosen as the Administrative Center employee of the month for February.

Dena, nominated by a colleague because of her warm and persistent commitment to serving students in need, holds an important position on the MCC financial aid team. As the program coordinator for default prevention, she works to keep students in good financial standing with their lenders and to keep MCC in good standing with the U.S. Department of Education. In other words, she helps students avoid defaulting on their loans which helps the district to maintain a low default rate.

In her direct work with students, Dena (pronounced Day-na) contacts students whose loan payments are past due to encourage them to set up payment arrangements or to let them know what options are available. More proactively, she also contacts students who are at risk of defaulting to help them get back on track with payments.

This financial literacy component is what Dena says she enjoys most about her job. When she counsels a student on how to avoid damaging their personal
credit score by setting up a budget and learning how to negotiate with their lender, she feels like she’s making a difference in that student’s life. (Sometimes she even participates in a student’s conversation with their lender through conference call.)

But Dena is not just helping students stay on track – she’s doing the same for MCC. Every year, the U.S. Department of Education assigns each college what is called a cohort default rate (CDR), which is a percentage of the total number of students entering repayment during the cohort year and the number of them that default within the first two years. (If this rate reaches 25%, the institution could be subject to sanctions such as holding loan disbursements for first time borrowers or even losing the ability to provide Title IV, financial aid, funding to students.) Each spring when the Department of Education releases a draft report of these figures, it’s Dena’s job to reconcile that report with MCC’s and lenders’ records. She irons out any discrepancies in order to lower the final percentage rate, which is then published by the Department of Education in the fall. And she’s pretty darn good at it: in 2010, when the cohort default rate from 2008 was under review, Dena was able to reduce the final rate from 10.1% to 7.4%.

All of the technical aspects of her job aside, Dena is admired by her colleagues for having a great spirit and a standout work ethic, and she feels the same way about them.

“The financial aid department contains so many valuable minds that work together to best serve students,” said Dena. “People are our most valuable resource and I feel lucky to have an awesome team to work with.”

Dena has been with MCC for almost 15 years. She started working in the bookstore at Longview when she was just 19 years old, then moved to a role with the Francis Institute at Penn Valley. After that, she worked in marketing and financial aid at the Business & Technology campus before moving to her current role in district financial aid about four years ago.

Dena holds a bachelor of science in management and computer information systems from Park University, a master of science in management from Baker University and a certificate in financial planning from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has held various leadership roles within MCC and in professional organizations, including serving as vice president of the BTC staff association, co-chairing the local financial aid organization Kansas City Regional Aid Professionals and co-chairing committees and serving on the board for the Missouri Association of Student Aid Professionals.