Student Financial Assistance Cluster – Assistance Listing No. Various
Recommendation: We recommend the University reevaluate its procedures and review policies surrounding reporting status changes to NSLDS to put a process in place to ensure the student status changes are being reported timely.
Expl...
Student Financial Assistance Cluster – Assistance Listing No. Various
Recommendation: We recommend the University reevaluate its procedures and review policies surrounding reporting status changes to NSLDS to put a process in place to ensure the student status changes are being reported timely.
Explanation of disagreement with audit finding: There is no disagreement with the audit finding.
Action taken in response to finding: Financial aid maintains a log of all Title IV withdrawals, and going forward it will provide access to this log to the Registrar’s Office and will notify the Associate Registrar each time a student is determined to be withdrawn for R2T4 purposes. This will ensure that the Financial Aid Office and the Registrar’s Office are aligned with regard to a student’s Title IV enrollment status. This will be particularly helpful to ensure compliance for students enrolled in modules, where a student could be considered withdrawn for a semester even if their transcript shows that credit was earned for all of their officially attempted credits. This compliance issue was discovered and remediated by Drake prior to the audit as part of our own internal review process.
Upon each submission of the graduation data file to the National Student Clearinghouse, the Registrar’s Office will double-check the count of awarded degrees that appear on the submission file and compare it to the number of awarded degrees as reported by Drake’s student information system. Additionally, shortly after each file is submitted to the NSC, the Registrar’s Office will cross-check a sample of JD graduates against both the NSC database and the NSLDS database to ensure that the graduation status for graduates of the JD program is being accepted and processed by the NSC as expected, and that they are in turn properly reported to NSLDS.
Name(s) of the contact person(s) responsible for corrective action: Kevin Moenkhaus, Associate Registrar and Brandi Miller, Assistant Director of Financial Aid.
Planned completion date for corrective action plan: September 1, 2024.