What Do I Need in the Toolkit?

A Best Practices Model for Institutional Scholarship Management

Helen Carter

Associate Director, Student Financial Aid & Scholarships

Texas Tech University

Four Common Needs of a Scholarship Account Manager:

1. Need to know what accounts I have

2. Need to know how much money I have to spend

3. Need to choose the most eligible recipients

4. Need to disburse the money within appropriate guidelines

How do I manage the four common needs efficiently?

Texas Tech University has a decentralized scholarship account management model with over 200 scholarship account managers.

Texas Tech built the Scholarship Tracking System to be our scholarship management tool!

Purpose of the Scholarship Tracking System

Show managers what accounts belong to them

Provide effective scholarship management tool to account managers campus-wide

Leverage scholarship funds

Capture scholarship award history

Allow campus users to enter their own scholarship awards

Provide methods for candidate search and review

Provide method for disbursing money within appropriate guidelines

Federal aid regulations

NCAA compliance

Provide central vehicle for campus users to access data outside of Banner security restrictions

How the Scholarship Tracking System WorksSTS access granted to

account managers; validated through Banner HR/Banner

Finance

Account managers grant

access/permission to other staff members

Awards entered on the STS by

account managers or their designees

Awards uploaded to Banner Student & integrated into

Financial Aid

Scholarships credit to student tuition; debit accounts in Banner Finance

1. Need to know what accounts I have

How do I find out what accounts belong to me? How is account responsibility designated? How do I or others get access to my accounts?

How do I find out what accounts belong to me?

Sign on to STS

Only accounts that I have access to show up on my list

How is account responsibility designated?

TTU assigns unique Banner ORGN code to each account manager

How do I or others get access to my accounts?

STS security levels are based on ORGN codes

Account mangers can grant 3 levels of STS access to others

2. Need to know how much money I have to spend

Where do I find:

Account balances

Expenditures

Account history

Where do I find account balances?

STS imports Banner Finance FY budget, expense, and daily balance

Allows you to set FY spending plan (even if others have access) using account award history, available funds, etc.

3. Need to choose the most eligible recipients

What are the eligibility requirements of my scholarships? What did donors specify?

How accessible are these requirements to committees/users?

How can I find students with donor-specified attributes?

Can I search out all of the required attributes?

Do I need a scholarship application?

How accessible is this data?

How can the tools for searching out eligible candidates be available to everyone who needs them?

What are the eligibility requirements of the scholarship?

Scholarship endowment records are stored in university imaging system or on-file in colleges and departments

STS provides a link to imaging system

How can I find the most eligible students?

Committees search for candidates by attributes required for specific scholarship accounts (need, high school, test score, etc.)

Choosing recipients….

Committees review eligible candidate data

Committees review best candidates’ imaged scholarship applications

Choosing recipients….

Committees enter awards

Scholarship awards are pushed to Banner every 30 minutes

4. Need to disburse the money within appropriate guidelines

How can scholarships be integrated into existing aid package within federal guidelines?

What about NCAA compliance? How can competitive scholarship waiver eligibility be

managed?

Integrating awards into existing aid packages…

Error list shows reason why awards weren’t loaded to Banner

Manual adjustments made to FA package

NCAA compliance…

NCAA compliance team reviews athletic hold list, releases awards for disbursement based on Banner athlete codes.

Competitive scholarship waiver eligibility…

Awards made to out-of-state students require acknowledgement that Texas education code 54.213 requirements have been met.

Helen Carter, Texas Tech University

helen.carter@ttu.edu