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 Pros vs. Cons Team work BUY-IN

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 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? 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 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? ISIR Loads

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 Grouping of Student Application Data

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 Letter Generation & Executing Communication Plans

Comment codes Parent/Student tax data flagged as “02” – cleared through IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) Parent/Student tax data flagged as “05” – did not use IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) but eligible to do so How Do You Identify Conflicting Information? How do you clear it? Reject/C- Flags

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? COD Processing & Reconciliation

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? Budgeting and Packaging Groups

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? Automated Packaging

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? Return of Title IV fund Processing

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 Russ Romandini Higher Education Assistance Group - follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Higher Education Assistance Group, Inc.