Fed Financial

Financial Aid Professionals: What is the best way to re-structure the Office of Student Financial Aid?

Four-year university of around 13,000 students. Currently OSFA has 30 employees. I need ideas for an organizational chart, workflow, etc. What works for your school?? Oh, yeah. We just switched from SIS to Banner operating system. I'm looking for some experienced advice. Thanks!!! We have thirty employees, but that includes four grad assistants, several student workers and all of our Student Employment Staff including student payroll. But kudos to all of the schools who process more students with less staff. This is why we need to restructure.

Public Comments

1. I can not speak directly to your question (I do not work in FA), perhaps I can offer some advice... as a fellow college professional, what matters to me as a lecturer, advisor, and administrator is the speediness and accuracy of student records following the completion of the distrubution of financial aid and scholorship monies. Accessibility is paramount to progressive and knowledgable advising. Without FA moving quickly and accurately, upon completion of the student's financial obligations, the process of class selection, changing classes upon entering, and finding the course work that's best for the student becomes utterly unbearable. The education process from advisement to graduation is dependent upon verification from your office- so a speedy distribution of knowledge through the many modes of communication your institution offers would be best. Presumably your institution has blackboard, eCollege, a mass e-mail system or other instituion software- utilizing these mode to communicate would be helpful. As for recommendations for workflow... you are on your own. Let me leave you with this... every institution has goals and "stategic plans for action" (or the like)- go to your institutions' roots for answers- what do you promise to give- (i.e. personalized education or committment to excellence, etc.) now give these promises a fighting chance. Good Luck- Prof. D., N.Y.
2. That's an awful lot of people for the number of students. Some of your restructuring may cause you to lose a few people. Our office has three officers that process verification and have program responsibilities. We have someone who translates the financial aid needs into tech language (and vice versa) to IT. We have a central data entry (they do data entry for the entire college) but we have one person responsible for getting the entered documents to the appropriate person for review. We use Datatel.
3. Our office has almost that many employees but for a lot bigger student body. We have five financial aid officers who split the alphabet; we have three employees totally dedicated to Verification processing, and we have other employees working on specific areas of aid: EDE loading, work study, state grant, outside scholarships, etc. I'm not sure if we ever used SIS at our school but we have been using BANNER for many years. It has it's quirks, but it's a really great system. SCT does a pretty good job in their documentation area. The only complaint that many people have is the UDC (their search engine). Not sure exactly what kind of advice you're looking for, but hope that helps somewhat. **Edited to add: it's also a very good idea to attend the national summit that SCT has each year. The one for 2008 is going to be held in Anaheim, CA. There are also state and regional summits. You can learn a lot from how different offices work with BANNER.