Setup Considerations: Continued Financial Aid Processing

Workday continues to evaluate eligibility and process financial aid for students using the Reaction Framework after you assign them an initial:

Cost of attendance (COA).
Merit financial aid package.
Need financial aid package.

The Reaction Framework for continued financial aid processing enables you to:

Automatically monitor events that might affect the student's:
COA.
Merit financial aid package.
Need financial aid package.
Easily configure your response to student events changes. You can specify the events you want Workday to react to, and how Workday should respond to them.
Keep student financial aid amounts up to date based on their eligibility.

You can configure Workday to react when:

A student fails too many classes for an academic period, and they don't meet the satisfactory academic progress (SAP) requirements to continue receiving financial aid.
A student withdraws from all of their courses for an academic period, and they don't meet the load status requirements to receive financial aid.
The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) rejects the student's loan application, and you need to repackage their financial aid to exclude all loans.

Questions	Considerations
How does the Reaction Framework work?	When a student's information in Workday changes due to an event, Workday flags the student's record for evaluation in the next Student Nightly Job Orchestration. During the Student Nightly Job Orchestration, Workday determines if the change in the student's information corresponds to a reaction reason on your reaction policy, and responds accordingly.
In what situations would you need to adjust student financial aid?	Consider all of the different events that require you to adjust student financial aid. Example: The ED requires students to have active ISIRs in order to receive any financial aid. Should their ISIR become inactive, you would need to update their awards. Consider both government and institution-specific events, and add them to your financial aid reaction policies. If you don't configure the event as a reaction reason on your reaction policy, Workday ignores it.
Do you want to reprocess student records automatically, or place students on a report so you can review and resolve events manually?	You can't process records that are on reaction review reports until you review and resolve the associated reactions. Resolving a reaction doesn't automatically: Process the record through the associated job. Flag the record for automatic reprocessing in a subsequent Student Nightly Job Orchestration run. To process a record and resolve the reaction simultaneously, either: Select Run on the reaction review report. Use the Run Student Financial Aid Processes by Period report.

Make sure that your COA and packaging reaction policies are in sync. Example: You add the Residency reaction reason to all 3 reaction policies. The

Reaction Method

is

Review

for your COA reaction policy and

Auto

for your packaging reaction policies. When there’s a change in the student’s residency, Workday places their COA under manual review, but automatically repackages their merit and need financial aid. The policies are out of sync because Workday repackages the student before you can review and reevaluate their COA based on their residency change.

When you use a

Review

reaction method, review your reaction events:

Manually in your Sandbox tenant for events you eventually plan to process automatically in your Production tenant. Verify that manual processing gives you the results you want before testing automatic processing.
Frequently. Run your reaction review reports regularly to make sure they're working correctly and minimize processing delays.
In order. Review and resolve COA reaction events before packaging reaction events to ensure accuracy.

In order for Workday to run continued financial aid processing for students, you must first assign students their initial COA, merit financial aid, and need financial aid through initial financial aid processing.

To comply with federal financial aid regulations, add

ISIR Activation

and

ISIR Edit

as reaction reasons on all 3 reaction policies.

To process financial aid based on the

Actual Enrollment Usage Start

date (AEUSD), add

Academic Period (POS) Load Status

as a reaction reason on all 3 reaction policies.

If you're using a manual review date control, define it on the

Maintain Academic Period Date Controls

task. If you don't define the date control, Workday treats the reaction as a manual review.

You can only use Workday delivered:

Reaction reasons. Workday delivers reasons that account for the most common use cases for updating financial aid amounts.
Date controls. Workday enables you to configure when the reaction reasons set for automatic review should switch to manual review. Consider which predefined date control you want to align with this transition

When you manually process a student's COA, merit financial aid, or need financial aid using the

Run Student Financial Aid Processes by Period

report, Workday bypasses your reaction policies and processes the record. Example: A student displays on the

Cost of Attendance Reaction Review

report with an

Academic Period POS Load Status

reaction. When you manually run the

Cost of Attendance

job for the student for Fall 2023 through the report, Workday reprocesses their COA and removes them from the reaction review report for that academic period.

No impact.

In order to configure financial aid processing, you must have access to these domains in the Financial Aid functional area:

Set Up: Cost of Attendance
Set Up: Merit Packaging
Set Up: Need Packaging

No impact.

Reports	Considerations
Academic Unit Policy Viewer	You can use this report to view the details of your reaction policies for an academic unit and level, or program of study.
Cost of Attendance Reaction Review Merit Packaging Reaction Review Need Packaging Reaction Review	You can use these reports to review and resolve reaction events.

No impact.

Continued financial aid processing interacts with these other areas:

Features	Considerations
Initial Financial Aid Processing	Continued financial aid processing can only begin after initial financial aid processing.

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.