uAchieve Pop-Up Chat: Financial Aid Eligibility

Earlier this month we hosted another uAchieve Pop-Up Chat to discuss best practices in the user community. This time around, we focused on the topic of sending uAchieve data to update to Banner for the purpose of federal financial aid eligibility.
Did you join in on the conversation? If not, we encourage uAchieve users to watch the recording below. Presenters included two of our Client Advisory Board members: Wil Perkins, Associate Registrar at Harding University in Arkansas, and Drew Lurker, Director of Student Records at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. We hope you can glean some insight from the informal questions and the discussions that took place around them. We asked Will and Drew to provide their own take-away points.
Wil’s key takeaways:

• Financial Aid reporting is an extension of the NCAA functionality.
• Remember, if you have courses that share between sub-requirements (double-dipping), you must create a requirement that will take this into account so that you get an accurate reporting of elective hours used to complete a degree program.
• Harding University only reports the excessive, non-program-of-study hours and not the individual courses.
• If you have courses that you require of students that may fall outside their elective hours, you will need to set up a sub-requirement to identify these courses to make sure they are not reported as excessive (e.g. students that have to take a course because they went on Academic Probation).
• While uAchieve can identify excessive courses, your institution will need to develop your own SQL query to extract the information into your SIS.

Drew’s findings:

• Though Ivy Tech Community College does not encode NCAA requirements, many of the principles that form NCAA encoding can be used to implement Financial Aid reporting.
• An advantage of uAchieve is its flexibility – the ability to create your own rules to account for how your institution operates. For example, allowing bible classes to count even if they are not needed is an important part of allowing an institution’s policy to be enforced while still showing the curriculum the way the faculty want.
• Ivy Tech has a state grant that has different rules from Title IV funding. The functionality shown in this session will allow us to define and process those rules. In fact, I think it will allow me to exclusively apply those rules to the programs affected by using a condition code to turn the requirement for the programs where students are eligible.

How might you apply these functions for your institution? Tune in below, and if you have any questions feel free to contact us here or message Conni Shaw at co***@co***********.com.