PeopleSoft Financial Aid 9.0 PeopleBook

Setting Up Financial Aid Terms

This chapter provides an overview of financial aid terms and discusses how to:

Define the parameters for creating financial aid terms.
Set up cost codes.

Understanding Financial Aid Terms

A financial aid term is a combination of a period of time that your school determines as an instructional accounting period and an academic career. Your institution defines the financial aid terms during the setup process. Because some institutions might not offer financial aid for all of their academic terms, only the terms eligible for financial aid are set up for each financial aid career. For example, if your institution does not offer financial aid for an intersession term, you would not set up the intersession term as a valid term for a career. To receive financial aid, a student must be enrolled in a valid program leading to a degree or certificate and must meet satisfactory academic progress standards.

Financial Aid enables you to maintain actual or projected enrollment data for a specific financial aid term for a student. Because PeopleSoft Campus Solutions also allows concurrent term enrollments in different academic careers and academic programs, the information maintained using the financial aid term is then used to determine a student's financial aid load, level, budget, and award. A financial aid term record is built for only one combination of career and program. If students are enrolled in multiple careers or programs, then career primacy information is used to determine which combination of career and program information is built in the financial aid term. The FA Term Other Units page displays units taken for the other career or program. Use the FA Term component to provide student term data for financial aid processing. The system tracks academic detail for each financial aid applicant on the financial aid term table. This information includes the student's career, primary program, academic plan, enrollment, academic level and standing, and financial aid standing. The financial aid office uses this data to validate a student's eligibility to receive aid, to establish a student's budget, and to proceed toward the Awarding process.

Many downstream financial aid processes, such as building student budgets, awarding students, originating student loans, requesting Pell funds, and disbursing aid to students, depend on having the financial aid term information built. Financial aid terms can be built with specific enrollment data or with projected data. Enrollment data is the enrollment statistics for a specific term from PeopleSoft Student Records. Projected data is projected statistics that come from many of the academic setup tables, such as the Level/Load Rules component, the Session Table page, the Academic Career Table component, and the Academic Program Table component. You must understand these tables and be familiar with the information that they contain to ensure the proper use and building of the financial aid terms.

The information that you enter on the FA Term Setup page determines whether the financial aid terms can be built using only enrollment data or changes to enrollment data (updates), or whether they can be built using projected data in addition to enrollment data (updates and projections). To provide an additional control on what type of data to use when building the financial aid terms, you can direct the financial aid term build process to use either updates and projections or updates only.

Defining the Parameters for Creating Financial Aid Terms

To set up financial aid terms, use the Set Up Financial Aid Term component (FA_TERM_SETUP).

You identify the terms that you want the financial aid term process to build for a student. Because your institution might not offer financial aid for all of its academic terms, you must specify which academic terms are also financial aid terms on the Valid Terms for Career page.

This section discusses how to set up financial aid terms.

Page Used to Define the Parameters for Creating Financial Aid Terms

Page Name	Definition Name	Navigation	Usage
FA Term Setup	RUN_CNTL_FATRMP	Set Up SACR, Product Related, Financial Aid Term, Setup Financial Aid Term, FA Term Setup	Establish the processing rules for building financial aid terms for academic careers.

Setting Up Financial Aid Terms

Access the FA Term Setup page (Set Up SACR, Product Related, Financial Aid Term, Setup Financial Aid Term, FA Term Setup).

Enter a row for every academic career that you assign.

Select	Select the check box to the left of each term to use in the automatic financial aid term build process when building terms in projection.
Term	Displays all of the terms that you associated with this combination of aid year and academic career on the Valid Terms for Careers page. If you do not select a term on this page, no FA Term information is built for the term when building terms in projection. If enrollment data exists for a term, that term is always built, even if the term is not selected on this page. During packaging, if your disbursement plan covers a term that does not have FA Term information, the system generates an error during the validation process.
Session	Displays the default session, such as a regular academic session or an Open Entry or Open Exit session, as established on the Session Table page in the Term/Session Table component. If your institution has more than one session for a term, this page displays only the default session.
Weeks of Instruction	Displays the number of weeks of instruction for the default session, established on the Session Table page in the Term/Session Table component.
Census Dt (census date)	Displays the date used to capture the student's enrollment for the term, established in the Census Date field on the Session Table page in the Term/Session Table component. If no FA census date is defined for the term on the FA Term Setup page, the financial aid term build process uses this census date to determine when to stop building terms with projected data and when to discard all terms built with projected data.
FA Census Dt (financial aid census date)	To stop building terms with projected data, and to discard all terms built with projected data after a certain date in the term, enter that date in this field. The term can no longer be built as a projection after the date that you enter in this field, and any projections for that term become inactive.
Lock	This lock is for census date activation. Select this check box to lock certain student enrollment fields as of either the census date or the financial aid census date. If both dates exist, the financial aid census date is used. If you run the financial aid term build process on or after the census date, the system does not change the data in these fields. You can override this lock at the student level on the financial aid term component. The fields that are locked are FA_LOAD (Financial Aid Load field on the Acad Level page) and UNT_TAKEN_FA (Taken field in the Term column on the Statistics page) on the FA Term table. The BUDGET_REQUIRED field (on the Financial Aid Info page) is changed to No Assign after the census date. If the term has no census date or financial aid census date, this check box has no effect. If the check box next to the term is cleared, then the Lock check box has no effect, even if it is selected.

Setting Up Cost Codes

This section discusses how to define cost codes.

Pages Used to Set Up Cost Codes

Page Name	Definition Name	Navigation	Usage
Cost Code Setup	CAN_COST_CODE	Set Up SACR, Product Related, Financial Aid, Canadian Application Processing, CNAS Cost Code, Cost Code Setup	Define cost codes and the number of financial aid weeks for each combination of institution, aid year, career, academic program, loan year, and term.
Copy Cost Code	COST_CODE_COPY_SEC	Click the Copy Cost Code button on the Cost Code Setup page.	Copy cost codes from a previous aid year or another career for the current aid year and career that you are setting up.

Defining Cost Codes

Access the Cost Code Setup page (Set Up SACR, Product Related, Financial Aid, Canadian Application Processing, CNAS Cost Code, Cost Code Setup).

Canadian institutions use cost codes to report financial aid calendars, length of financial aid award periods, and cost of attendance information to the Canada Student Loan program. The FA Term build process uses this information to determine the student's cost code and financial aid number of weeks and then populates the new fields on the student FA Term page.

Academic Program	Select an academic program for which you want to define a cost code.
Loan Year	Select a year in school to associate with the academic program for the cost code. Values are: 0: First Year, Never Attended 1: First Year, Previously Attended 2: 2nd Year 3: 3rd Year 4: 4th Year 5: 5th Year A: 1st Year Graduate B: 2nd Year Graduate C: 3rd Year Graduate D: 4th Year or more Graduate G: Graduate/Professional
FA Weeks (financial aid weeks)	Enter the number of weeks in the term for financial aid purposes. The number of weeks for financial aid can be different from the number of weeks in the term.
Start Date and End Date	Enter the dates that the instructional period begins and ends for financial aid purposes. This field is populated by default with the term start date and term end date from the Term/Session Table component. The start and end dates for financial aid can be different from the start and end dates of the term.
Cost Code	Enter the cost code to associate with this combination of career, program, and year in school.
Regulated Program	Indicate whether the program is regulated by Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). Regulated programs might be subject to tuition and fee caps and therefore handled differently in the Ontario Student Loan (OSL) assessment of a student's contribution and need. Values are: N: Nonregulated program R: Regulated program
Copy Cost Code	Click to access the Copy Cost Code page and copy the list of cost codes from an established combination of institution, aid, year, and career to the current combination that you are setting up.