Maintaining Eligibility for Financial Aid

Hi, welcome to our rock. The fast food web series I am Brad with the financial aid office and we have a moderating force today.

Before we get started, we do have just a few little householding tips going on.

And just keep in mind that during the presentation that you can see us, but we can't see you if at any point you have any questions, feel free to put that into our chat and we'll be sure to answer those once we get into.

That section of it. This is being recorded so afterwards this will be available on our websites and all students who complete their fasfa before October 31st this year are going to be put into our drawing for one of our $1000 scholarships, so be sure to get that.

Completed before then.

And also attendees of our webinar series will be entered to win a rock the fast but door prize.

So today we're going to be talking about maintaining your eligibility for financial aid. That's going to be including a federal aid state aid, and also our institutional aid.

So for your federal aid, you have to maintain what is called satisfactory academic progress, and this is based upon three criteria which those components are completion rate, GPA and also maximum timeframe.

Ann for your completion rate that just states that you have to complete at least 67% of your courses that you attempt, and that's going to include any repeat hours in complete hours. Concurrent hours if you are high school students and also going to include courses that were included in any academic clemency or also bankruptcy.

Ann for GPA. There's just two different requirements for its so for undergraduate students have to have a 2.0 cumulative GPA and for graduate students, that has to be at 3.0 cumulative GPA.

And for students who hit maximum timeframe, this states that students who are in an academic program have 150% of the time it takes to complete that program to complete it. So for a student who's going for a bachelors degree, typically those programs are 120 hours in length. So you have up to 180 hours to complete that degree plan. Students who aren't in associate's. Those are typically 60 credit hours, so you have up to 90 credit hours to complete those.

And if you fail to meet any of these standards, it will kind of go through a process. So all students are in good standing. Are students from eating satisfactory academic progress? If you fail to meet one of these, you will get a warning semester except for those students who hit maximum timeframe. So on the warning semester, you are still eligible for your federal aid and you have until the end of the semester to get yourself back into good standing. But if you fail to meet good standing by the end of that semester.

Will go on suspension and at that point you would be ineligible for your federal aid.

So there are two ways. If you do go on to suspension to get back into good standing. One of those is to enroll on your own through outside sources so it can either be through an alternative loan or a third party loan, but you can raise your GPA or completion percentage back into good standing and regain your eligibility. The other way is going to be through ASAP appeal and with that he would complete one of our SAP forms. It'll have an academic plan on it that you complete with your academic advisor.

And it will have you write a letter kind of stating what happened that led to your suspension and what your plan is going forward to. Bring yourself back into good standing and it'll also have any kind of documentation.

But

from there it will go to a committee to review it, and if approved, it will reinstate your federal aid eligibility and keep you on that academic plan as long as you're meeting the criteria for it.

And for renewal requirements for institutional aid, this will be going over our scholarships that we offer here through the University.

So we always encourage students to kind of keep up with the renewal requirements. 'cause a lot of the different scholarships have different requirements for it and there are a number of ways to keep track of that. One of those is 3 or scholarship contract that you receive when you first receive it. The other one is through our website or by contacting our office.

And I'll kind of let you take a look at these for a minutes. This will be going over our merit. Scholarships are prestigious scholarships as well as the transfer and the Arkansas scholar scholarships.

Ann for state aids. There is a link below here to their scholarships, right through a dhe. They offer a number of different financial aid scholarships, so be sure to check with them to kind of see what it is for the certain aid that you're requiring will go over the Arkansas Challenge, which a lot of the students here receive. So for the traditional challenge, your first freshman semester, you'll have 12 hour requirements for that very first semester, and then it will go on to 15 hours each semester after that.

Until you get to your 7th or 8th semester for your senior year and there it will kind of prorate depending upon your enrollment status, but you have to be in at least six hours to receive the award.

And for the GPA requirement, you have to keep a 2.5 for it.

Student loans.

OK, so for student loans you do have to be in at least six hours towards your degree plan for it to process.

OK, and institutional aid otherwise noted in your contract requires at least 12 hours enrollment each semester. It is recommended that you do take 15 hours per semester to graduate within that four year period.

And then state also has enrollment requirements, but make sure to check with your scholarship provider to know what those are.

And with that, I'll open up the floor to any questions that you may have.

Did we mention that?

Oh, and be sure if you do have any kind of questions or anything, feel free to reach out to us at the contact information provided below.