Tweak new Leave of Absence section in Student tab

Love the new ability to track leave of absence, but there is confusion with the fields. The 180 day issue is only related to Financial Aid and loans - it has nothing to do with the school tracking when the student plans to return. It needs to be clearly marked that it's for tracking regulatory info related to FA. And a second field needs to be added (text) for the school to track the return information. In the example I attached, we will either be entering a term or text explaining what we know about the student's situation.

Every school is going to have different policies about the length of LOA. Ours is 1 year but sometimes with the Dean's approval, it can be extended. Whether or not they return to the school is a separate issue from FA loan deferments. And some of these folks do not have loans so it's a moot point.

Thanks for listening!

LOA confusion.jpg

Mark Ackerman May 26, 2015 23:24

Hi Sue,

We've adjusted the new field so that you aren't limited to 180 days. You can now make it as long as you like. Therefore, you should consider the built-in LOA Anticipated Return Date field to be your own institutional LOA end date, not one that is specific for Federal Aid. We still do, of course, take the 180 day limit into consideration for Clearinghouse reports as required by their Programming and Testing Guide and we still email a handy reminder to the registrar when the 180 day approaches.

As far as recording a textual reason for the LOA, you'll still need to do that with a simple custom info text field.

Thanks for your input.

Tweak new Leave of Absence section in Student tab

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