Overview
- Nelnet Campus Commerce announced a phased rollout of PayPal and Venmo starting August 19, 2026, and the option is also being enabled through Illumia and TouchNet.
- Students and families can choose PayPal or Venmo inside their school’s normal online payment portal and may fund payments from linked cards, bank accounts, or app balances.
- Several early-adopter institutions already accept the wallets, including Michigan State, Texas Tech, Bellarmine, Butler and Kansas State, with more campuses expected to enable the option as they complete technical and security checks.
- Colleges or processors may charge transaction or processing fees that can add materially to large tuition bills, and PayPal says some eligible PayPal and Venmo balances get pass-through FDIC protection only when held at program banks rather than from the company itself.
- The move builds on PayPal’s prior campus deals and Venmo’s roughly 100 million U.S. accounts, and it could shift how students manage big payments while leaving rollout speed tied to each processor’s and campus’s readiness.