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Calculate Scholarship on a Percentage Basis

Cyndi Myers

August 15, 2017 13:30

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I would really like to be able to offer scholarships on a percentage basis, rather than an actual dollar amount, so I would like Populi to offer functionality to allow for this calculation. 

I would like to award someone a "50%" scholarship, and have Populi then look at how many credits they are enrolled in, what their tuition rate is, and then calculate the scholarship at 50%. 

Without this functionality I have to manually calculate everyone's scholarships and ensure they are added to Populi in the correct dollar amount.

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21 comments

• 
  Toby Robinson February 26, 2021 07:27 Official comment

  You can now set new awards to be percentage based. Pleased contact support if you have any questions.

   

• 2
  
  Dee McOwen August 15, 2017 14:47

  AMBS would also like to see this happen.

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  John Hilger October 18, 2019 14:58

  I would be interested in this as well, has there been any movement with this request?

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 15:02

  nothing that i know of yet... but keep voting! really need this implemented!

   

  John & Dee -- how do you currently manage this process?

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  John Hilger October 18, 2019 15:05

  Are you still doing it manually for each individual student or have you found a partial solution that you might want to share?

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  John Hilger October 18, 2019 15:12

  We currently set up different tuition schedules with 10% or whatever percentage already calculated into it. But obviously this method doesn't work as well for our accounting team with A/R and such.  

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 15:24

  Still doing it manually - very very manually. 

  For a little while, my IT department had built my a report that pulled data from getEnrollments API + financial aid details from the API, so I could at least identify quickly which students had registration changes that may also impact their scholarships. However, recently we've run into issues with that not pulling data correctly. Hoping my IT can find a solution to that.

  In the mean time, I've subscribed to the new-ish functionality Populi has to send emails whenver someone makes a registration change - but that doesn't help me know even if they have financial aid or not, and it send an email for every single class change, so a bit overkill. 

   

   

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 15:27

  We briefly thought about doing it through tuition schedules - but doesn't that  impact reporting for 1098-Ts also? 

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  Suzanne Huffman October 18, 2019 15:40

  Cyndi,

  Yes, that would impact 1098-T reporting. Tuition charged as well as Financial Aid awarded would be misrepresented.

  We also have a very manual process. Our Financial Aid person has to check every student who adds/drops for the current semester. Very time-consuming!

  I wish I could vote multiple times for this functionality to be added!

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 15:43

  Thanks for the input all! Let's hope Populi can add this soon!!! Would be such a game changer with time spent calculating and re-calculating financial aid!

   

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  John Hilger October 18, 2019 15:46

  Not too certain, but I don't think so. Here is an excerpt from the IRS 2019 Instruction for forms 1098-T:

  Qualified tuition and related expenses. Qualified tuition and related expenses are tuition, fees, and course materials required for a student to be enrolled at or attend an eligible educational institution.
  
  

  I just spoke with my accounting department and the only information that we put on the 1098-T is what the student actually paid for tuition and not the CoA. 

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  John Hilger October 18, 2019 15:48

  oops, I guess I was wrong. I need to look into how this impacts the 1098-T better

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  James October 18, 2019 16:05

  Hi all,

  This is definitely on our radar - the tricky bits are:

  1) How do you deal with changing charges throughout the term as the student adds/drops classes (always update the award? sometimes update the award? what if all term disbursements have already been posted... do you schedule a new disbursement/return to source for the current date? do you want to recalculate the award if the student returns some books to the bookstore and receives a $10 credit?) .

  2) Specifying exactly what is and is not included in the amount the percentage is used on to calculate the award (e.g. tuition only? tuition and some fees/all fees? some/all bookstore charges? and do you reduce that amount by all/some credits?).

  We'd actually really appreciate your feedback describing your use-cases related to the above... if most use-cases are pretty simple, we can probably get a version one of this feature out before too long, but if folks need all the bells and whistles to make it useful it will take longer.

  Thanks!
  James

  Edited by James October 18, 2019 16:06
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  Suzanne Huffman October 18, 2019 16:15

  We apply the percentage to Tuition ONLY. Oh, and ours is based on credit hours taken. No fees, no bookstore charges.

  As for updating the award, we update the award amount - adding an extra disbursement or refunding to source - until the end of Add/Drop period.

  For example, if Student X is taking 9 Credits and they receive 50% financial aid, we would take 9 * (cost per credit hour) * .50

  If Student X drops one 3-credit course and adds a 2-credit course, we would need to recalculate their 50% for 8 credit hours and schedule a refund to source.

  If Student X drops one 3-credit course and adds a different 3-credit course, there would be no change.

  If Student X drops one 3-credit course and adds a different 3-credit course PLUS a 1-credit course, we would need to recalculate their 50% for 10 credit hours and add an additional disbursement.

  To make it slightly more complicated, I believe we do a different amount depending on whether they are considered part-time or full-time (based on their number of credit hours). You would need to call our Financial Aid Office to confirm that. I work in the Business Office so I complete the Financial Aid Batches and record in GL, but am not the one doing the calculations and entering the Financial Aid in the first place.

  Anything you can do to help with this process would be much appreciated!

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  James October 18, 2019 16:27

  Hi Suzanne,

  That's helpful, thanks!  So what if Sally Student gets a $100 tuition credit applied to the term for some reason... would you recalculate her award off of (Original Tuition - $100) or leave the award alone?

  Also, one question I forgot to ask earlier is how these percentage-based awards should show up on award letters: since often aid is packaged before term charges are invoiced, the actual math would say it's a $0 award so far, but I'm guessing that's not what you want to show when Sally accepts her award letter.  Actually, if she accepts the award at the end of summer then even if she has Fall charges already calculated she certainly won't have Spring charges yet, so the award letter would only have access to half of her overall charges for the year (yet is supposed to show aid for the entire aid year).

  So would you need the ability to specify an "Estimated" amount for each term, and that's what's shown to the student (with an indicator that it's an estimate) until we have actual term charges for each term and the math has something to chew on?

  Cheers!

  James

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 18:00

  First of all, would just like to say I'm VERY excited to see some traction on this!

  Our school uses it at a pretty simple level I think. 

  We ONLY factor in tuition, never fees. We operate on credits also, like Suzanne. I'm primarily interested in having the scholarships adjust based on percentages through the add/drop period so that it matches their invoice correctly. 

  We actually adjust the disbursement itself up & down based on if the student adds/drops credits, since the disbursements are not yet posted. AFTER the add/drop period, we either add a refund to source to reduce the scholarship. For us, scholarships never increase after the add drop period, they would only decrease. I'd be okay with still having to manually adjust these ones. 

  I think we would need a field or setting to set the percentage at the individual award level. For example, right now I track the percentage using a custom financial aid field, but if the student has more than one scholarship, they could be at different rates, so that gets confusing. Since I do it manually, I know which to adjust and how. The system would also probably need to be able to understand which scholarship takes precedent. So if there were two awards - which to apply first, and then which to apply second against the student account. We'd also want to make sure loans were always applied last. 

  To make it a little more complicated, we always apply outside aid received first, then our institutional scholarships, then loans. Most of the time scholarship rates don't change when the student gets outside aid, but we also never actually pay out institutional scholarships, should their outside aid + institutional aid = more than term charges. If that happened, we'd decrease the institutional aid accordingly. 

  My first choice would be to have this automatically calculate and change the disbursement amounts based on changing registration. BUT, perhaps as a stepping stone something even like "pending charges" in the finance/billing section of Populi would be helpful. There currently isn't even a way to identify someone in real time who has 1) a percentage based scholarship + 2) a registration change. 

  I'd be happy to discuss this more on a phone call if that would be helpful. Its possible you all are trying to account for every complicated scenario... but even some preliminary features to help get us towards this could be huge in time-savings and manual processing. 

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  Cyndi Myers October 18, 2019 18:03

  as far as award letters go, i think it would be great to simply allow us to pull in custom financial aid fields, or even award level custom fields, into award letter templates. This could allow us to customiz the eligibility requirements that are connected with the scholarship itself, as well as pull in a field that shows what the actual percentage is - as opposed to a $$ value. 

   

  Right now though, for example, if someone had a 50% scholarship, and our full time enrollment requires 12 credits, we'd calculate what 50% of 12 credits is per term, and add that amount with a disclaimer that the amount may vary based on actual enrollment, and that the amount shown shows the minimum awarded for a full time student. 

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  Cyndi Myers February 25, 2020 14:44

  Seeing lots of recent changes to Financial aid, which is exciting. Any chance this is on the roadmap? (please 🙏)

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  Helen Tagawa November 25, 2020 21:06

  Our scholarships are also provided as a percentage of the tuition amount, and the process of applying this to individual invoices each semester is a time consuming process. This would be a tremendous enhancement to the Populi system. 

   

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  James December 18, 2020 17:27

  I'm pleased to announce that the first version of this feature has been developed and is going through testing - however, as you can imagine there are lots of complicated edge cases so QA may take a while - but it should be out early next year!  

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  Cyndi Myers December 18, 2020 19:39

  YES! So excited to see how this will work!