Earlier this month, the University of Arkansas System announced a program to offer employees a new way to deal with student loans. The annual Leave Exchange program allows employees to convert unused annual leave into taxable cash payments that reimburse qualified student loan payments.
Colton Morgan is the director of administrative communications at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He says this program is for more than just employees there, but for the Fayetteville campus alone, there are about 5,000 to 6,000 employees at any given time of the year.
"About 4,400 of them are eligible for this because they accrue leave. That's really the baseline thing. You could be part time accruing, full time accruing leave — as long as you accrue leave, you can use it."
The latest data shows the UA System employs more than 28,000 people, and Morgan says many of those qualify for this program.
"So across the system, we're probably thinking well over 10,000 to 15,000 employees that are probably eligible for this program."
The simple version is this: you must have a position that accrues leave; you must maintain at least 80 hours of leave after the exchange; you must have made a student loan payment on or after July 1, 2025; and you cannot have had disciplinary actions related to leave within the past 12 months.
It's worth noting that the loans need to be in the name of the employee, but don't necessarily have to be the employee's own student loans. Someone can use this toward the loans of a spouse or a child if those loans are in their name.
Morgan says this kind of program is an advantage to working for the university system.
"I see the benefit for so many people, and knowing that kind of financial security can happen really speaks to our whole philosophy around the whole employee and our benefits package — supporting them in multiple different lenses."
He says that because annual leave is pretty generous at the University of Arkansas, HR finds that lots of hours don't get used by employees and therefore get lost. For him, success means that employees find ways to exercise those benefits in alternative ways.
"Decrease some of those carryover hours that they otherwise would just lose, and actually make use of all the leave that they get. We really do have a generous leave program, especially for annual leave and people taking time off, but we don't always see people utilize that, and we want people to utilize the benefits we're giving them."
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