Blogs

This coffee break focused on all the special things we do to process prospective students.

There are so many different and great ways that schools are processing incoming students! Many institutions indicated that their financial aid offers are sent only electronically to both incoming and continuing students, while other institutions either do a combination of mailing a paper version and sending an electronic to incoming students.

Some institutions package incoming before verification is completion while others wait until verification has been completed. For those that package before verification is completed, the majority did not provide a financial aid offer until c-codes were resolved and/or would review students where the information on the ISIR seemed blatantly incorrect. The vast majority of schools indicated that they do not package continuing students until verification was completed.

In order to increase FAFSA filing rates, many schools are adding a checklist for students who don’t have a FAFSA is not on file. This checklist then displays in the Student Center as a ‘To Do’ item and then gets waived or completed when the FAFSA is received. Some do this just for incoming while others do it for continuing students as well. Most schools indicated that they are not sending a communication in conjunction with the checklist. Penn State Admissions helps with FAFSA reminders for new students in which they have an integration that allows them to know which students already filed a FAFSA.

For all of students who receive a financial aid offer but then subsequently cancel their admissions, schools are canceling the awards via external awards, repackaging, manually or setting the awards  to an offered status. 

For the College Financing Plan, there is a PRP that was released (Document 2739393.1) or it is delivered in PUM 24.   The delivered SF external awards feed is a great way to get any veterans benefits that are posted directly to the student account on the financial aid offer so it can be pulled into the College Financial Plan.  Make sure the student has at least $1 in the COA to allow the CFP to display to students! 

You are not alone if you are seeing a significant increase of students selected for V4 verification!