JOSEPH RUIZ ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OFFICE

OF STUDENT FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Getting Proactive About Over

Awards

What is an Over-award

An over-award exists when a student’s aid package exceeds his or her need. While your school must always take care not to over-award a student when packaging his or her aid, circumstances may change after you have packaged the student’s aid that result in an over-award.

Example

A student may receive a scholarship or grant from an outside organization. When an over-award situation arises, you may be required to adjust the Federal Student Aid (FSA) in the student’s package in order to eliminate the over-award.

Over Payments

Over-awards only become overpayments if a school cannot correct them before funds are disbursed to a student. That is, an overpayment exists when some or all of the funds that make up an over-award have been disbursed to the student. An over-award exists whenever:

• a student’s aid package exceeds his or her need (including when the student’s Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is revised upward after initial packaging);

• a student’s award exceeds his or her cost of attendance (COA); and

In general, unless a school is liable, a student is liable for any overpayment made to him or her.

A Brief History of over awards at TAMU-CC

Our office would begin to run over award jobs at least two weeks prior to disbursement

Once aid was disbursed into a student’s tuition account we would run over award jobs 2 or 3 times per week to catch any potential over award prior to refunds being released

Why were not successful?

History Continued

A student’s resources were only posted for the fall

Never had a true picture of the total number of over awarded students

Students asked why adjustments were made entirely in the spring (I did not have a good answer)

Approached our Business Office and asked if resources could be posted for the entire year and was told that it would mess up tables

Time to get Proactive

Like these power point slides the idea came like rays from heaven

What if the financial aid office, with the help of our programmer, created an estimated resource on our private scholarship screen for every student receiving a resource in the fall term

The thought was I would rather give the aid back if they did not receive the resource in the spring

Where Resources are Posted by Business Office

Where Private Scholarships are Posted

What does this all Mean!

Because we are able to estimate the resource for the spring we can adjust a student’s financial aid for the academic year

Our goal is loans first, but we make sure that a student is not over need or over the Cost of Attendance

Students are more pleased getting their aid returned if they are eligible

What does this Mean Cont.

We post all private scholarships manually so students should not be over awarded

In the last three years less than 5 students have returned money due to an over award caused by resources

Safety Net

The Impact of Getting Proactive

% of Total Charges sent to Collections

FY 2009 0.68%

FY 2010 0.53%

FY 2011 0.43%

Due to the hard work of our Accounts Receivables Dept. and getting proactive about over awards, we have seen a steady decline in the % of total amount billed being sent to collections

Questions ?