PayPal and Venmo now let students pay tuition bills

PayPal said Wednesday that its Venmo app will let users pay tuition directly, expanding one of the country’s most popular peer-to-peer payment apps into one of the largest recurring bills households face.

The company is partnering with three education payment platforms — Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce, and TouchNet — which collectively serve thousands of colleges and universities. The integration gives students and families another channel to route tuition payments, alongside bank transfers, checks, and the card-based options those platforms already support.

Nelnet Campus Commerce president Jackie Strohbehn framed the move as a response to affordability pressure. “For students and families, tuition is the single biggest financial decision they’ll navigate for higher education,” she 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.”

TouchNet president Jeremy Loch echoed that framing, describing the integration as one that “enables institutions to broaden choice and create a more frictionless payment experience for students and families.”

Venmo has built its brand on small, social payments — splitting rent, utilities, and group dinners — a use case far removed from a five-figure tuition bill. The expansion into education payments follows a broader pattern of PayPal and Venmo pushing into higher-value transactions beyond peer-to-peer transfers, as the company looks for ways to embed itself deeper into recurring household spending.

For colleges and universities, adding PayPal and Venmo as payment rails costs little: the integration runs through payment platforms they already use, rather than requiring a new vendor relationship. For families, it means one more app competing for a transaction that has traditionally gone through a school’s own billing portal or a bank.

Why it matters

The move signals how payments companies keep chasing higher-value transactions to grow revenue, extending consumer apps built for casual spending into institutional bill categories once reserved for banks and dedicated tuition-financing platforms.