Joseph Ruiz Assistant Director Office of Student Financial Assistance

1. Joseph Ruiz Assistant Director Office of Student Financial Assistance Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

2. Getting Proactive About Over Awards

3. 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.

4. Example • Astudent 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.

5. 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.

6. 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?

7. 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

8. 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

9. Where Resources are Posted by Business Office

10. Where Private Scholarships are Posted

11. 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

12. 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

13. Safety Net

14. 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

15. Questions ?