In case you’re not familiar with Need Access, it is a financial aid application offered by Access Group that gathers information from students to determine their eligibility for institutional financial aid.
Fifty four schools currently use Need Access, 24 law schools, 24 health professional, and 6 business and general graduate schools. This year, the 09-10 academic year, 22,000 new applicants used Need Access. Click here for a list of Need Access participating schools.
2010-2011 Product Updates:
1. Improvements will be made to the “re-submit” process. Schools have several processes to help manage the applicants that update their application after the initial submission. To date, we have over 1700 resubmits this year.
2. Going forward, the student’s marital status will be aligned with the FAFSA. In addition, new options will include “separated”, and “divorced/widowed” to better gauge the applicants’ situations.
3. Additional data file layout will include a XML file format.
4. Although, we’ve only had one instance of a student that couldn’t use the Pay-Pal feature, the Pay-Pal process will be refined to ensure ease of transaction.
FAFSA Simplification and Need Access:
FAFSA simplification seems to be on a lot of minds. There are 2 stages to the simplification.
·Right now … A reduced number of questions will make the application process easier.
·In the future … pending legislation will eliminate many savings and income-related questions from the FAFSA … stay tuned for the impact to the EFC!
See the resources section to the right for a complete copy of the Need Access Update Presentation.
