Prerequisites

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)/Student Aid Index (SAI) 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.