Transcript Making The Most of Your Financial Aid System

Making The Most of Your
Financial Aid System
Anna Kelly
Director of Financial Aid
New England Institute of Technology
Russ Romandini
Senior Systems Analyst
Higher Education Assistance Group, Inc.
What is needed to succeed?
Support from
teammates
Support from
boss or bosses
Knowledgeable
resources
Willingness to
try (and maybe
fail) a few times
before you get
it right
Challenges
• Describing the benefits of new
processes to colleagues outside of the
financial aid office
• Convincing administration to spend
money
• Managing time to conduct work while
maintaining daily office duties
• Learning the technical stuff
New Job, New Software,
New Experiences
• Accepted position as financial aid director at a
private, non-profit college as of September, 2010
• Now had to use a system I had not used before
• Limited experience with 2 plus 2 system with 4
ten-week quarters
• Limited IT support
• New responsibility of upgrading software
updates
Where Do I Begin?
• Needed to set up annual year roll process,
and decided to bring in outside help to
make sure I learned best practices for my
software
• Involved staff in new set up procedures
• Involved staff in what automation options
were available
• Involved staff in what functions we
need/wish list
New
Processes
Valued
Added
BUY-IN
Pros vs.
Cons
Team
work
Putting The Plan Into Action
Establish Timeline
Increased usage of
Self-service function
Automated missing
information letters
Automated
satisfactory academic
progress process
Make A Plan and Stick To It
• Dec 2010-New year 11-12 roll process
• Feb 2011-Auto-packaging with tracking
• March 2011-Auto-packaging and
student self service/web accept of
aid/loan periods
• May 2011-Missing information letter
• Aug 2011-SAP process
Ongoing Efforts
• Staff training is continuous communication and training for staff
and ½ day training sessions
• Allow plenty of time for
questions/discussion
• Increase comfort level with changes in
their tasks/stress benefits to students
What Are Your System Hot Spots?
• When did you last make a list of items that
you would like to automate and/or
improve processes?
• Where can you improve automation in
your system or remove redundancy?
• Benefits of automation
• Improves processing accuracy & awarding
equity
• Increases staff & student satisfaction
Where Can I Make System
Improvements?
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Managing System Release Updates
ISIR Loads
Student Applications
Letter Generation
Conflicts
COD Processing & Reconciliation
Budgeting & Packaging
Automated Packaging
R2T4
Software Release Updates
• Who manages system release updates
on your campus?
• How would you rate your level of
system support on your campus?
• How quickly are system upgrades
loaded?
• Are you a beta-tester or do you wait to
hear about any potential known release
issues?
Software Release Updates (cont.)
• Is automation embraced on your campus
or are many things still done manually?
• For those using a single-source system, is
information fed routinely to and from
other key offices? (Admissions, Student
Accounts, Registrar etc.)
• How many of you believe that you’re
getting the most out of your current
software package?
ISIR
Loads
• ISIR Data Load & folder preparation
• Review ISIR Load Process
• How often are files loaded?
• How much time does the file load
process take?
• Is there a process in place to
account for the potential of
dropped records?
• Are there ways to improve accuracy
and/or efficiency?
Grouping
of Student
Application
Data
• Have you clearly defined your student
groups?
• Entering students
• Returning students
• Not Selected for Verification
• Selected for Verification
• V1, V2, V3, V4, V5
• Independent
• Dependent
• Graduate Students
• Ensures that data can be segmented for
reporting and executing communication
plans
Letter
Generation &
Executing
Communication
Plans
• Are communications to students
automated to run on their or
through executable job
processes?
• Missing documentation letters
run every other week (or more
often depending on need)
• Award letters run weekly
• Right to cancel notifications run
day of disbursement
How Do You • Comment codes
• Parent/Student tax data
Identify
flagged as “02” – cleared
Conflicting
through IRS Data Retrieval
Information?
Tool (DRT)
How do you
• Parent/Student tax data
clear it?
flagged as “05” – did not
Reject/Cuse IRS Data Retrieval Tool
Flags
(DRT) but eligible to do so
COD
Processing &
Reconciliation
• Clearing Loan exceptions
• Sending Loan Disbursement
Notifications
• Is your DL Reconciliation
process automated through
DL Tools or other process?
• What have you done recently
to further automate and/or
streamline your loan process?
Budgeting
and
Packaging
Groups
• How have you
segmented your budget
groups?
• Do you assign budget
groups in batch or do
you manually assign a
group upon initial file
review?
Automated
Packaging
• Are you using the automated packaging
functionality in your software system?
• Saves time and improves awarding
accuracy & equity
• If yes, to what extent are you using it?
• Federal funds only
• Institutional funds
• Leveraging
• If not, why not?
• Lack of internal resources?
• Shortage of expertise on campus with
implementing formulas?
• Other?
Return of
Title IV
fund
Processing
• Does your software system
have built in R2T4 processing?
If so, is it being used?
• How do you capture list of
withdrawn students? Do you
have control to run
withdrawal reports or do you
depend on receiving data
from other departments?
Additional Recommendations
•Paperless options
•Satisfactory Academic Progress
•Federal Work-Study processing
•Do you have a process that you’ve
recently automated that has
improved efficiency and/or equity?
Thank you for attending our session!
Anna Kelly
New England Institute of Technology
[email protected]
Russ Romandini
Higher Education Assistance Group
[email protected]
www.heag.us - follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Higher Education Assistance Group, Inc.