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.