[ctcLinkfinaidsupport] FA Student Budgets for Census Period Withdrawals

Tue Jan 11 15:24:44 PST 2022

Thank you so much, Kelly. I appreciate the explanation; I greatly favor understanding how the system interacts and the reasons for how things are set up.

So I hope you will forgive just one more teensy question to help me explain it to my office colleagues: WHY does ctcLink use Enrollment-Based Budgeting to zero out budgets, as it seems counter-intuitive when the majority of the withdrawals will have disbursed awards remaining after R2T4? Is this out-of-the-box coding that can't be changed, or it something else impacted elsewhere in the system that makes this a requirement? This is such a complicated system that it's hard sometimes for us to see how much of a "ripple effect" there is with each action.

I will have to give the work-arounds some thought and discuss with my supervisor. It seems there isn't any "solution", per se, just options in how we handle these. We'll have to weigh the consequences of potential human error against the inconvenience of disbursement delays and restoring budgets to see what best works for us.

Thank you for the explanation and the options!

Sharon

Sharon Gerlach
Program Specialist 2
Financial Aid Office
Spokane Community College
Sharon.Gerlach at scc.spokane.edu<mailto:Sharon.Gerlach at scc.spokane.edu>

From: Kelly Forsberg <kforsberg at sbctc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2022 2:35 PM
To: Gerlach, Sharon <Sharon.Gerlach at scc.spokane.edu>; ctclinkfinaidsupport at lists.ctc.edu
Cc: Mandy Mineard <MMineard at sbctc.edu>; Marissa Baker <mbaker at sbctc.edu>
Subject: RE: FA Student Budgets for Census Period Withdrawals

Hi Sharon,

Thanks for your patience on response to your email.  ctcLink uses Enrollment-Based Budgeting, by global design, so this is why the system zeros out the budget when the student drops all classes.  During Census, we know that this can be a lot to manage insofar as tracking what awards the student has truly earned since withdrawing.  It takes a lot of manual touch on faking out their FA Term and budget to get the award to accept, only to be zero'ed out again through the overnight process.  You are 100% correct on that!

There is a 'workaround' for this, but it is not best practice in ctcLink-but it's helpful to be aware of it.  The FA Term Override Expiration Date field can be handy to set a future date to lock these FA terms in place at the time the amount the student earned was finalized.  Note, that if this 'workaround' is used, you are inviting much human error and even more manual touch and perhaps fixing errors, but the benefit (sometimes) could possibly outweigh the cons-in certain situations only.  For example, if you're 100% sure the student won't return to the institution.

[cid:image001.png at 01D806FF.5B7067B0]

However, if you do not know if they'll return after withdrawing, or their enrollment changes within the same term (think enrolling in dynamic dates classes that start later in the term after the withdrawal), using this 'workaround' can be extremely troublesome if you are faking out FA Load to what the student's enrollment was at the time of disbursement to get the award to stick, and then the FA load actually changes, later on, and you don't catch it.  These withdrawn to zero budget students should be captured and managed using the identified queries below.

I too strive for clean query results and for the number of errors I am working to drop off the query list, but we would rather have an zero'ed out budget amount instead of cleaning up potential errors to awards and/or recon from a generally not recommended practice of using the 'workaround described above'.

To be clear, the ctcLink best practice is to run these queries daily until the Census Date:

CTC_FA_LOAD_COMP_BETWEEN_DATE - This query compares students with different FA load level when disbursed to date entered in the prompt.
CTC_FA_CENSUS_DATE_LIST - This query identifies students who have a discrepancy between the FA Load captured at the most recent Authorization via the Award Activity page versus the FA Load in FA Term.  This query will only pull students who have a discrepancy between FA Loads.
CTC_FA_SERVICE_INDICATOR_LIST - This query identifies students who still have the FLF Service Indicator assigned.  Review the FLFs and find out of any of them can be released once enrollment is confirmed.

After census is run, you can run the queries:

CTC_FA_TERM_OVERAWARDED - This query identifies students who have been over-awarded in their term COA amount.  We all know that the students who have had their budgets zero'ed out are not true over-awards; but it's good to identify them using this query so you can mark them as reviewed.

PS.  cc'ing Marissa Baker and Mandy Mineard, as this question was originally posed in the ctclinkcssupport list serv.

Hope this helps, and thank you for the great question!

[Compass]Kelly Forsberg
ctcLink Functional Trainer | Financial Aid
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
o: 360-704-1066
kforsberg at sbctc.edu<mailto:kforsberg at sbctc.edu>

From: ctcLinkCSSupport <ctclinkcssupport-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:ctclinkcssupport-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Users via ctcLinkCSSupport
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2022 12:07 PM
To: ctclinkcssupport at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:ctclinkcssupport at lists.ctc.edu>
Cc: PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Users <ctclinkcssupport at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:ctclinkcssupport at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: [Ctclinkcssupport] FA Student Budgets for Census Period Withdrawals

Hi, all,

I have a question about the setup for how student budgets are updated for census period withdrawals. Mostly I'm wondering why a student's budget for the term is zeroed out when the student withdraws from the term during the census period, because very few of our census period withdrawals require all aid to be cancelled for that term.

If the student attended, R2T4 is required, but much of the disbursed aid will remain disbursed. When the budget is then zeroed out, the student is put into an overaward situation for future terms. We can restore the budget to allow the next term's disbursement through, but it will just zero out again overnight and will have to be done for all future disbursements in the academic year, which causes delays in these students receiving their aid.

I'm curious about the logic behind this setup and wondering if it can be changed, or if the impact would extend beyond the financial aid component into other areas.

Thank you!
Sharon

Sharon Gerlach
Program Specialist 2
Financial Aid Office
Spokane Community College
Sharon.Gerlach at scc.spokane.edu<mailto:Sharon.Gerlach at scc.spokane.edu>

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