Understanding Awarding and Packaging Students
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This section discusses early decision awarding, review of information relevant to awarding, awarding and packaging financial aid, award notification, and award updating.
The terms awarding and packaging are often used interchangeably. In Awarding and Packaging documentation, Awarding refers to manually offering one financial aid item type (award) at a time to a student. Packaging refers to awarding multiple awards at one time to create a financial aid award package for a student.
Early financial aid offers are made to students using award categories instead of specific awards. Award categories give "early decision" students an idea of the types of financial aid that they might receive without committing to exact awards. You define these award categories for your institution. For example, you might have categories for loans, scholarships, work-study, and grants. For awarding actual financial aid monies to the student, you use specific financial aid item types using one of the methods of awarding or packaging.
Before selecting awards for students, you review information on aggregate aid limits, restricted aid awards, and the student's status in the financial aid cycle. You can view aggregate aid information by aggregate area, such as Perkins or Stafford. If your institution uses the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) totals for the federal Stafford subsidized, unsubsidized, Perkins, Pell, Academic Competitiveness Grant (ACG), National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART), and Student Education Opportunity Grant (SEOG) programs, ensure that NSLDS data has been loaded and pushed to the aggregate tables for direct use by the Awarding and Packaging processes. NSLDS totals are pushed to a specific aid year and you can override them on the Incoming Aggregate Aid component. You can also view a summary of aggregate aid for a student or look at aggregate information by institution.
You can use inquiry pages to monitor a process that awards restricted aid to students. Graduate departments that award merit-based aid might use the Restricted Aid pages. These pages provide information on the progress of the restricted aid awarding cycle; committee members can enter their final decisions, including the restricted aid award amount. This information can then be used to enter the restricted aid award for a student.
The Packaging Status Summary page contains information about a student's status in the financial aid cycle, such as financial aid application status, institutional or federal verification status, Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) status, and information related to packaging a student. You can use this page to prevent the Awarding process from continuing if certain parameters are established. For example, you might only award federal awards if the student is meeting SAP. To change a value on the Packaging Status Summary page for a group of students, use Mass Change.
The Packaging Status Summary page has links to other pages where you can review or sometimes modify a student's information. These linked pages contain Financial Aid Term (FA Term) summary information, ISIR data, database match information, the student's financial need calculated with federal and institutional methodology (FM and IM), Pell processing information, Pell eligibility calculation overrides, restricted aid information, and the current financial aid award package information.
After reviewing information, you can award and package students for financial aid manually or in one of three automated ways:
Manual Awarding is done online, one student at a time, entering awards one by one.
Auto Packaging is done online at the student level and uses a packaging plan, a set of institutionally defined rules for awarding.
After Auto Packaging generates a financial aid award package for the student, you can make any manual changes to awards in the package before saving the information.
Mass Packaging is a background process for packaging groups of students using one or more packaging plans.
You select your student population, using either a query definition, an equation, or an external file of students. Then the system assigns a packaging plan to each student based on the processing order and selection criteria associated with each plan. Finally, you initiate the actual Mass Packaging routine, which packages the students based on their assigned packaging plans. After each step in the process, you can further define your targeted population by removing individual students from the selection or packaging plan assignment process.
Auto Select Packaging mimics Mass Packaging selection as the system evaluates both the Selection Criteria and the Processing Order for each packaging plan, and assigns a packaging plan to an individual student.
You can manually update the package before saving, validating, and posting.
Auto Packaging, Auto Select Packaging, and Mass Packaging use packaging plans to generate award packages that appear on the same page you use for manual awarding. Packaging plans use rules predefined by the United States Education Department (USED), your institution, or both. You can manually modify any generated award package.
After packaging, a validation process verifies that all federal eligibility rules, aggregate aid limits, fiscal fund balances and rules, award rules and limits, and packaging plan rules are met. For automated processing, this is part of the final step when the award package is given to a student. For manual awarding, you click the Validate button to initiate the validation process.
After validation, use a financial aid award notification (FAN) to notify students of their award packages. To do so, you assign a communication to a student and use your choice of mail merge software. If awards change for a student, you send multiple FAN letters.
If a student declines the financial aid offered or declines a category of aid, such as loans, you can use mass actions to accept, cancel, or decline all or specific categories of aid.
Throughout the aid year, you can view summary information regarding the student's awards and the disbursement of those awards.
Although you can award students manually, the most efficient way to package financial aid awards is with Auto Packaging, Auto Select Packaging, Mass Packaging, or a combination of these three. You are encouraged to set up the parameters needed for Auto Packaging and Mass Packaging to take full advantage of the Financial Aid system.
For manual awarding—assigning individual awards to students, one student at a time—you must set up your defaults (installation defaults and aid processing rule sets), financial aid item types, aggregate aid limits, disbursement plans and disbursement split codes, award adjustment reasons, and award messages for FAN letters.