Response to Finding 2023-001: Status Changes
Management Response
Saint Vincent College concurs with the finding of delays in reporting changes of student enrollment status to the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) and attributes the delays to 1.) the first cohort of a joint program with another institution reaching completion 2.) a data breach reported by National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) in June 2023.
All students identified as being reported outside of the required time period are enrolled in the joint Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing between Saint Vincent College and Carlow University that began in Fall 2019. Under the agreement for this program, the Registrar’s office of Saint Vincent College reports enrollment to the NSLDS via the NSC. Students graduate with a Carlow University degree. Saint Vincent College is to report program completers as withdrawn at the end of the final enrollment period and Carlow University is to report the students as graduated. The first cohort through this arrangement completed the program requirements in May of 2023. The students in this cohort were not included with the other student enrollment status changes reported in May 2023 following the end of the semester/graduation. While Saint Vincent did ultimately report the cohort as withdrawn, it occurred outside of the required time frame.
Saint Vincent’s primary method of reporting status changes to the NSLDS is through the NSC. The NSC reported a data breach on June 26, 2023, at which point the College’s IT department instructed the Registrar to immediately stop sending data to the NSC. The resulted in the aforementioned cohort of students not being reported to the NSC or NSLDS until September 2023 when the College’s IT department provided approval for the Registrar to resume sending data to the NSC.
Corrective Action
Beginning March 1, 2024, Saint Vincent College’s Financial Aid Office in conjunction with Registrar’s office has implemented a 45-day report to verify that all withdrawals and completions have reached NSLDS via the National Student Clearinghouse. The discovery of any that did not reach NSLDS will be manually reported directly on the NSLDS platform to avoid being outside of the 60-day requirement. Further, during any period of known issues/outages of NSC, the College will report status changes directly to NSLDS.
Conclusion
The College deems that the corrective action steps outlined above will sufficiently resolve the findings and prevent any future instances of untimely reporting of enrollment data to the NSLDS.
Responsible Party,
Joshua A. Guiser, CPA.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer
Chief Financial Officer