Understanding Auto Packaging and Mass Packaging

Before setting up your packaging plans, perform the following steps to define your institution's needs:

1. Define the populations of students who may have unique needs and for what awards they are eligible.

   Your student populations might include undergraduate students, graduate students, and medical students. Within your graduate population you might have students in a teacher credential program, masters level students, and Ph.D. level students. Within your undergraduate and graduate populations you might group students by their academic program or plan, such as sociology or physical education. Medical students might be grouped by their year in the program, for example first year or fourth year. For reasons of equity, especially if your institution cannot meet all students' financial need, you may want to group students by their financial need, as determined by subtracting Expected Family Contribution (EFC) from cost of attendance (COA). In that case, you may have a population defined as undergraduate students with need greater than 10,000.00 USD and another group defined as undergraduates with a need less than 10,000.00 USD.

2. Determine which awards students in each group are eligible for or which awards you want to give certain students, and in which order these awards should be offered.

   Each financial aid award that your institution offers may apply to all students or to only a specific group of students. For example, only undergraduates are eligible for Pell Grants and only students from California are eligible for Cal Grants, but you might have a University Grant for which all students are eligible regardless of their career or residency. You are now ready to start grouping awards together into a packaging plan.

Using Financial Aid, you can create packaging plans that give the system instructions on how to award or package a student with various financial aid awards. You should create your packaging plans to meet the needs of your various groups of students. Packaging plans are used when groups of students are packaged in a background process (Mass Packaging) or when the system automatically packages an individual student online (Auto Packaging). A packaging plan groups together financial aid awards and enables you to set specific rules for how that group of awards should be given to students. You can also specify other important parameters in a packaging plan, such as how much federal need the packaging plan meets and how the aid is disbursed to students. The packaging plan can incorporate nearly all decisions that a financial aid counselor makes when creating a financial aid package with specific financial aid awards. Because a packaging plan is set up to make decisions that a financial aid counselor would, the packaging plans must reflect your institution's financial aid awarding philosophy so that the automated process works most effectively for you.

If you have a group of similar awards, such as endowed restricted funds, which have very specific target populations, you might want to group these awards together into a related item type group. You can define the group and include it in a packaging plan as an individual award, instead of adding individual restricted aid financial aid item types to packaging plans.

Individual financial aid item types can be part of as many packaging plans as you prefer. Some financial aid item types can be in every packaging plan, such as an unsubsidized Stafford loan.

Not all financial aid item types in a packaging plan are issued to all students who are selected for that packaging plan. The packaging plan assigns financial aid item types to students based on selection criteria defined for each financial aid item type and the overall packaging rules set up as part of the packaging plan. For example, a packaging plan includes ten different financial aid item types, but a student receives only five of the ten financial aid item types because of eligibility requirements or because the student's financial need is met. Although you are not packaging students in this section, it is important to know how packaging plans are used to set them up effectively.

After you group your individual financial aid item types in your various packaging plans, decide in what order you want the various awards to be made. This decision depends heavily on your institution's financial aid packaging policies. The automated Packaging routines process individual financial aid item types in a designated order within each packaging plan. The automated Packaging routine continues awarding up to a dollar limit or a percentage of need defined in the packaging plan, or up to the cost of attendance, depending on the type of awards that are included in the packaging plan. Because awards are packaged in a specific order up to the defined limit, you may want to sequence entitlement awards near the top of the packaging plan to ensure that they are awarded. You might want to put less desirable awards, such as unsubsidized loans, lower in the order.

In addition to selecting and sequencing awards in the packaging plan, you must set up several other parameters. Define packaging targets, award limits, equity limits, loan award limits, work award limits, and the disbursement schedule for each award. For award-related limits and disbursements, you can use the default value for the award—as defined in your financial aid item type setup—or you can define values to be used for the award when it is included in a packaging plan.

Throughout the setup of your packaging plans you can use equations to identify a population of students or to perform calculations. Use the Equation Engine to create these equations.