You can Venmo your college tuition, for some reason
- ID
- 15548
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 19 Aug 2026, 8:00 PM
- Fetched
- 19 Aug 2026, 8:37 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/you-can-venmo-your-college-tuition-for-some-reason/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 2.0
- Created
- 19 Aug 2026, 8:39 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_founders
What happened
PayPal announced that Venmo and PayPal can now be used to pay college tuition through partnerships with education payment platforms Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce, and TouchNet, which collectively serve thousands of US colleges and universities. The article is largely satirical, questioning the wisdom of making five-figure tuition payments on the same app used for splitting coffee bills.
Why it matters
This is a US-specific vendor announcement with no direct impact on Malaysian builders, payment infrastructure, or fintech tooling. Unless you are building education-payment integrations for the US market, there is no action to take here.
Discussion angle
Brief mention only: what the expansion of consumer payment apps into high-value transactions signals about payment-rail convergence, and whether any of this is relevant to Southeast Asian payment ecosystems like DuitNow or FPX.