Last year, in response to both legislative changes to Federal student aid programs and shifting federal priorities, significant changes were made to the requirement that postsecondary educational institutions provide enrollment information to the Department of Education’s National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS).
As the breadth of the new requirements became clearer, financial aid and registrar professionals raised questions and concerns about the logistics of complying. Since last May, NASFAA, AACRAO and the Department of Education have held a handful of discussions, with the associations providing critical feedback on the real-world impracticalities of some of the requirements and highlighting aspects of the regulations that require clarification; and the DoE offering background rationale and clarifying details.
Unfortunately, these conversations came late in the implementation process, since the requirements went into effect in July 2014. Even with an extension to October, higher ed professionals and vendors working with institutions on reporting protocols had to comply with the new requirements with many unanswered questions and issues still being ironed out.
"Institutions and vendors have found some of the new reporting requirements unworkable,” said Brad Myers, AACRAO President and University Registrar at The Ohio State University, who participated in the meetings with the DoE. “The spirit of the law was to get a sense of what program(s) a student was in, where the 150 percent juncture of that program was, and where is the student’s progress toward completion. The devil was in the details.”
Though it would have been better had these meetings been held earlier in the implementation process, , the DoE and the associations have now undertaken “a great strategy of trying to work more collaboratively toward identifying issues and possible solutions going forward ,” Myers said.
Toward that end, AACRAO partnered with the DoE and NASFAA to offer two well-attended webinars last summer. And AACRAO will offer two sessions at this April’s AACRAO Annual Meeting in Baltimore, where participants will review:
- The reasons for these reporting changes.
- The campus and program-level reporting requirements.
- Situational examples.
- Tips to avoid many common errors.
Those sessions, “Federal Requirements for Institutional Reporting of Enrollment to NSLDS,” will be presented by Jeff Baker, Policy Director, Federal Student Aid, at the DoE, and Valerie Sherrer, Director, National Student Loan Data System, Federal Student Aid at the DoE – both of whom were involved in the meetings with AACRAO and NASFAA over the last year.
“The era of reporting and data issues is not going to get easier,” Myers said. “But this specific issue has been a spring board for talking and working more effectively on issues in the future. If we step back from the difficulty with implementing these requirements and take a look from a philosophical perspective, these conversations have been a wonderful opportunity to identify topics and issues with folks in the DoE much earlier, and work collaboratively on them. We can be more effective as institutions, professionals and vendors, and, as organizations, offer better service to our members.”
For more information and to register for AACRAO’s 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore in April, please visit the Annual Meeting website.