Change Proposal: Financial Aid Packaging Process

In order for the Financial Aid Office to award aid, students must be packaged through a process ch takes into consideration their specific requirements and their enrollment status. The Financial Aid Office attempts to capture student requirements and streamline the packaging process for students by using a packaging program called PARS (Packaging Aid Resource System). Most undergraduate students can be packaged by PARS automatically. Each year, the system automatically packages approximately 12,000 undergraduate students.

However, the program has a limited number of packaging algorithms and plans available. In recent years, the program has not been flexible enough to package awards for all students with enrollment profiles that differ from the standard undergraduate profile. Consequently, many students' aid must be packaged manually.

In order to package financial aid manually, a staff member works with a calculator to determine the financial aid package for each applicant. Given the amount of intervention required on the part of staff members, manual packaging causes substantial delays in the awarding of aid to students. It is estimated that manual packaging delays aid awards by a minimum of two weeks, and often longer, depending on the time of year and other demands on staff energies. Over the course of the year, it is estimated that at least 1 FTE of staff time is devoted to manual packaging.

PeopleSoft will enable the Financial Aid Office to program the necessary parameters to allow for automated packaging of all subgroups. In fact, parameters will be established for continuing education students, part-time students, graduate and exchange students. For those groups whose financial aid has been packaged manually, the cycle time needed from the receipt of an application to the generation of an award letter will be shortened by two to three weeks. Student satisfaction with the timeliness of financial aid awards should improve.

In addition, the implementation of PeopleSoft will greatly reduce the number of times students experience "bounce-back," i.e., being bounced back and forth between offices in order to complete transactions. Staff members in Financial Aid Services will be able to send updates to the Bursar's files in a more timely manner and reduce reliance on paper forms transferred by hand between offices.

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