Regarding student status change reporting, we identified a primary issue as the cause of late reporting this year for 32 of the 33 issues identified by our auditors. Upon review, we have determined changes that will prevent future instances of late reporting.
As would be known to the federal govern...
Regarding student status change reporting, we identified a primary issue as the cause of late reporting this year for 32 of the 33 issues identified by our auditors. Upon review, we have determined changes that will prevent future instances of late reporting.
As would be known to the federal government, a website and database conversion of the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) made enrollment reporting unavailable to schools for most of the academic year. One consequence to this was that the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), transitioned away from what they refer to as a mid-month roster response. It was not known to us that the NSC was not regularly submitting mid-month response files to NSLDS after enrollment reporting resumed in January of 2023.
Our monthly enrollment SSCR file is scheduled to be sent to the NSC on the first of each month. Our scheduled graduation date is the end of April or start of May, so we typically send an updated graduated student list around the middle of May. We were delayed from submitting this until the first week of June. The data submission was too late to be caught by the June 1st SSCR sent by NSLDS, but we expected that it would be sent by the mid-month file sent by NSC to NSLDS around June 15th. This would have kept us within 60 days for reporting. However, since NSC did not conduct mid-month reporting in June, the data we submitted indicating graduations that occurred at the end of April/start of May sat until July 1st with NSC and it was not sent to NSLDS within 60 days.
Conversations we have had with the NSC since this discovery assured us that they have resumed mid-month reporting as of July, 2023. Additionally, our analyst with the NSC assured us they would track our transmission schedule to know if data is refreshed and current at the time of their responses to the first of month SSCR files they receive from NSLDS. When the data we send comes through after a scheduled SSCR file has been processed, they will reach out to inform us of a mid-month roster being sent. To provide accountability toward this, we will make it our process to check with them on whether a mid-month roster will be sent also. When NSC does not expect to send mid-month files automatically, we will order an ad-hoc enrollment report from the NSLDS website. We experimented with this process in recent months when we became aware of this issue with mid-month reporting and found it successful. In discussion with NSC and NSLDS, we inquired as to whether we should simply increase the frequency of our NSLDS SSCR to twice per month. For the majority of the year, this is not necessary. It was a unique situation this year in that mid-month reporting had ceased following the NSLDS Enrollment Reporting being offline for half or our academic year.
For one additional student in the sample, an error was found with our student information system not updating the effective date of their enrollment change. Our software vendor was asked about the conditions of this error. They had made a modification to the reporting logic early on this past year, and this logic has proven to be inaccurate. The issue was not apparent through most of the year because enrollment reporting was not being conducted because of the previously mentioned NSLDS website transitions. Upon learning of the error, our software vendor updated their logic and has issued a patch that will correctly update the enrollment status effective date. All corrective actions will be fully implemented by October 31, 2023.