Identifying Cohort for Eligibility

Megan Smith

We are in the process of setting up scholarships. Some of them are for a specific cohort of a major (i.e., S1=Senior 1 semester of Nursing, S2=Senior 2 semester of Nursing). The status is not noted in Banner, so it would require hard coding based on their courses. We would be highly interested in automatching, but we are being told by our IT that would be too difficult of coding to include in the nightly feed for a few reasons but specifically with the potential for class subject/course numbers changing. For scholarships like this only needing to know their cohort classification, do you use apply-to or automatch?

Arly Douglass

@Megan Smith Could applicants self-identify on their general or conditional application? If so, then you can auto-match based on their response to that question.

Russel Heskin

@Megan Smith I'm not sure if this helps, but at my institution, the Registrar has a “Class Code” field that identifies a student's program and year. For example, “M3” is a third year medical student, and “O1” is a first year Optometry student. (We are a graduate only, health sciences only university.) The Class Codes are imported into Award Management along with other student data, and that allows us to easily create a qualification based on that. Without this, we would have to update scholarship qualifications each year based on class description (OD 2023) or expected graduation date.

Megan Smith

@Arly Douglass yes, they could. We were trying to avoid it because all the other scholarships in the department are automatched from Banner data. However, self-identification is an option we're considering.

Megan Smith

@Russel Heskin Thanks for sharing this, Russel. This gives me an idea, and I'm hoping we can do something similar. All the other scholarships in this department are automatched, so we hate to have the student submit information that we should be able to track in our system.