Multiple Active Award Years

Cherisa Lewis

Our colleges and Financial Aid would like to have two award cycles open at the same time in Award Management. For example, this year we kept 21-22 award year open for audit while we launched the 22-23 award year. It's not ideal but our colleges want to make award offers earlier to be more competitive. Are there any institutions that do this successfully?

Thank you

Ellen Soulis

Following

Mallorie Fonseca

Yes! EIU has been doing this for about 4-5 years now. It's a lot more difficult to manage and track the archiving/cloning process if your departments have different dates for the applications. But if you start it out with a plan for cycle management, I'm sure you will find it manageable as well.

Linda Wright

Are there any other schools doing this? We want to keep the current cycle open thru the middle of second (Spring) semester to continue making awards, while accepting applications for the following academic year (a separate cycle). We've been told that it is technically possible, but not recommended. We'd be interested in how others handle it.

Joel Spiess

Yes, UW-Milwaukee does this, as well. We have the current year and the next year open simultaneously every academic year. I agree with Mallorie – it is manageable if you have a plan.

Shawndi Wilson

We keep two years open at one time so we don't archive our general application each year. We also have a university award limit by year which is difficult since the encumbered funds show all years. If the encumbered funds were by academic year, we would be pleased with our process.

Dee Dee Wallace

Yes we have two award cycles open for a period of time. We just don’t archive the current cycle and then open our new cycle. It works with no problem.

STACEY HOWARD

Following

Lindley Davis

Appstate does this. We're only in our second cycle, but it's worked well. We archived 21-22 applications in December and we will archive 21-22 scholarships in July once the fiscal year closes. For a brief window, only 22-23 scholarships and applications will be open. In December we'll archive the applications and clone opportunities for 23-24.

Cherisa Lewis

For UW-Milwaukee or any others who have two years open, are you making awards to the same students for both years or for totally different cohorts? Our frustration has been the encumbered funds figure is for both years. Is there a way to see encumbered totals broken out for each year?

Joel Spiess

Yes, in some cases, we are making awards to the same students for both years. (They are not separate cohorts.) We have experienced the same challenge with the encumbered funds figure. We worked out a solution with our SIS import file that pulls back in the funds awarded for next academic year alone. So, BAM isn't calculating that amount by award year, but your SIS financial aid portal certainly is, so it could be included in the import file.

Lindley Davis

Hi Cherisa,

We have the same frustration with encumbered funds. There is an AM Enhancement request out there (it looks like merged 5 requests into 1). If anyone would like to vote and add their thoughts in the comments, maybe it will get some traction!

Shawndi Wilson

We have the same problem especially having a University award limit per year. My experience is much like Joel's. We have a work around but it makes each committee have a manual step to check the encumbered funds for each student before submitting their awards. In some cases, we are awarding to the same students but there are also new students being awarded too. If the encumbered funds were broken out by years that would be AWESOME! It is our one and major complaint. We actually purchased another product but decided not to implement due to this very reason. The other product had other issues so we went with Award Management for now.