Enrollment File Submission Process

Resources

• File Submission Process PDF
• Programming & Testing Guide
• Check Your Knowledge:

Transcript
Welcome to part two of the Enrollment Reporting webinar series. We will review the who, when and how of reporting enrollment files to the Clearinghouse. So first we'll go over when and who to report, touch on the programming and testing guide, the Clearinghouse enrollment reporting data flow, your institution's contact list and FTP account email notifications and best practices when reporting enrollment data for compliance purposes. It is important to report accurate and timely data the Department of Education and the National Student Loan Data System also known as NSLDS requires institutions to certify all federal aid recipients at least every two months and we recommend that you report enrollment status changes to the Clearinghouse as swiftly as possible because the Department of Education requires status changes be sent to the NSLDS within 60 days of the date of determination.

In general, the Clearinghouse recommends submitting data on a monthly basis and reporting should align with your institution's term. First of term files should arrive after the ad drop period has ended but no later than 30 days from the term begin date for compliance purposes. Then subsequent of term files should be sent every month about 30 to 45 days from the previous file certification date direct term until reporting the term is completed. The final subsequent of term file must be submitted before submitting any graduate only enrollment files. Grad only files can be reported on or act as term end date as your institution conducts degree audit. Enrollment files are processed in chronological and received date order. So therefore you must complete reporting for the prior term before files are processed for the new term. To learn more about the transmission schedule and the various file types, you can review the recording of part one of this webinar series or sign up for our next live presentation of part one.

Before you prepare the file, it's important to identify the students who should or should not be reported and we do recommend reporting all students that are or were enrolled in the current term including degree or certificate seeking students, non-degree seeking student, no SSN or International students, continuing education students students studying abroad under a school sponsored program, students studying at another institution under a Consortium agreement arrangement in which you are the home institution or the degree awarding institution and then all students receiving aid or loans including direct or federal family education or ffel loans. This also includes any dual enrolled high school students that are receiving aid or loans. Students that can be reported based on your institution's policy are students that are not currently taking classes but are preparing a thesis or dissertation required for degree completion and dual enrolled high school students that are not receiving aid or loans. So those are students that can be reported for your institutions policy and then there are students that should not be submitted on your enrollment files and those are students that are taking courses at your institution under a Consortium agreement where you are the host or visitor school and their home institution will be awarding their degree and in turn reporting their enrollment and then students that are attending or auditing courses and do not have an active enrollment status of less than half time or higher. We are not able to accept data for students without an enrollment status and of course, if the students are on an approved official leave of absence, they should be reported. They are included in students that should be part of that. It's just students who don't have any status at all those they should be omitted. So the first step in reporting your enrollment data to the Clearinghouse is to generate the enrollment file. Because there are so many different student information systems, we're not able to let exactly how to extract the data onto a file, however, there is a Clearinghouse enrollment reporting programming and testing guide available that includes the file layout and error resolution report guide and so much more. To navigate to the programming and testing guide, over at the Clearinghouse website and you would just go to studentclearinghouse.org on the gray bar near the top of the page, hover over colleges to make a drop down menu appear, then click on enrollment reporting. A new page will appear and on the right side of the page, you will see a list of resources and you would click on programming and testing guide and then that guide will open in a new browser window. You can choose to print this guide, however, we recommend just saving the link as a favorite in your browser instead. This will ensure that whenever you go to reference the guide you have the most current version of the guide available.

And then for institutions that submit data in the EDI format or utilize the Cora application system enrollment data, we do have an EDI implementation guide and a Cora user guide that should be referenced for formatting and submitting data. These institutions would use the regular enrollment reporting and testing guide as well as a reference or just general reporting information. As well as there's an error resolution report guide that's also on the regular programming testing guide. So for EDI and Cora institutions you would utilize both the ones specific for EDI and Cora in the regular guide and to obtain a copy of the EDI implementation guide or the Cora user guide, you can reach out to us at schoolOps@studentclearinghouse.org.

Now that you know who and when to submit, we're going to briefly take a look at the life cycle of an enrollment file. So first the data is extracted from your institution student information system and the enrollment file is created and next the enrollment file is submitted to the Clearinghouse through the use secure FTP site. An email is sent to those listed on the FTP account contact list. Then after the enrollment file is received, a series of edits are run on the file to ensure that the data transmitted is correctly formatted and meets the Clearinghouse standard. Then the file is added to the enrollment file processing queue to be assigned and reviewed by data operations analyst. If there are errors or warnings present on the file, the error resolution report will either be auto posted or manually posted to our secure site for your institution to review and correct. Then once you've reviewed and corrected or confirmed all the errors, the warning the error report can be sent back to the Clearinghouse. The assigned analyst will perform another review of the file and if there are no additional errors or warnings that need to be addressed, the file is processed and the data is loaded into the Clearinghouse database. If further review or clarification is needed, the analyst will repost the error report and may reach out via email or phone once the file is loaded into a Clearinghouse database. The data from that file is now available for other Clearinghouse services and reporting to loan servicers and the NSLDS for eligible students. So having an up-to-date contact list with the correct individuals and role types assigned is an essential part of working with the Clearinghouse and especially to the enrollment reporting process. This allows the Clearinghouse to alert the right role type at your Institution for awareness, transparency and so that the right person at the institution can take action when needed. Each contact profile should include the individual's name, title, direct phone number and email address so that we can effectively communicate with your institution. The roles that will need to be assigned to the individuals will depend on the responsibilities and interactions that they will have with us at Clearinghouse. Certain rules will allow you to log into the Clearinghouse website to access error report, perform manual updates to Student Records, update the transmission schedule, as well as access other Clearinghouse services. User administrators are the only individuals that are able to request or make changes to the institution's contact list. Every institution should have one or more individuals assigned as a user administrator to manage the Clearinghouse contact list. We would recommend partnering with these individuals to ensure that you are on the contact list and the FTP email list as necessary. If you're not able to determine who is assigned the user admin role at your institution you can reach out to us at 703-742-4200 to advise who is on your institution's contact list with the user administrator role. Please note that in addition to the contact list for the main zero zero branch, there is a separate contact list for each active enrollment reporting branch your institution has with the Clearinghouse, if any. And this includes official and unofficial branches. If your institution has more than one branch that you should have access to, your user administrator will want to create a profile for you on each contact list. If your institution only reports data to the Clearinghouse under one branch, then your institution will only have one contact list. Once you've been added to your institution's contact list and assigned a web ID, you are able to log into the Clearinghouse's secure website. And to log in, you would navigate to studentclearinghouse.org, click on the user login button and a new page will appear where you can enter your username and password. The username and password for the Clearinghouse secure website is unique to the individual and should not be shared with anyone else. If your institution has multiple branches and your user administrator is having difficulties adding you or anyone to the contact list, you can reach out to us at school Ops at studentclearinghouse.org.

If you are a user administrator and need assistance with making changes to your institutions, we do have a help link on the Clearinghouse website that covers some common user admin topics. Once logged into the Clearinghouse site, you will see the help icon at the top of the screen. Clicking this button will direct you to a new page. Under the self-help for educational institution section, click on school secure site help and then in parentheses that's for colleges. And then a new page will open to the Clearinghouse school secure site knowledge base. On the right column, you will find the account management tab section and there are two help articles listed. One contains instructions for making changes to the contact list and the other is a list of the user role types and their definitions. And again, if you have any questions that you can reach out to us at schoolOps@studentclearinghouse.org email or calling our customer service line. Now the FTP site is different from the Clearinghouse secure website and it is used to enable secure electronic file exchanges between your institution and the Clearinghouse. The login credentials for the secure FTP site is a shared username and password for all of those individuals that need to access the FTP account at your institution. If you have forgotten the username and or password, we would recommend working with others at your institution that have the access before requesting a password reset. And that's because again it's a shared username and password for the FTP site so if you forgot it someone else might remember it, but also if you request to reset the password, everyone on the FTP email list receives that password reset. So if someone sees that email before you have a chance to reset it or someone resets it without sharing with the group that can cause some confusion. So before doing a password reset, make sure you communicate internally. If you want to access the secure FTP site, navigate to the Clearinghouse website, studentclearinghouse.org. On the home page, click on FTP login at the top of page versus user login and then a new page will appear where you can enter the FTP account username and password. Once logged in, you can submit files, access files that the Clearinghouse has provided for your institution to retrieve and you can update the FTP email distribution list as well once logged in. If you aren't sure if you're on the FTP email distribution list, after you've logged in, in the green banner at the top right of the page there's a button that says my account. If you click on that and scroll down to edit your email settings, you can add and remove the email addresses from this contact list as needed. User administrators should take note there is a role on the institution contact list on the secure site that is listed as FTP. Assigning this role on the regular contact list does not update the email distribution list, it just identifies those individuals that you expect to access the FTP account. To manage the actual contact list to receive emails regarding the FTP account, they do need to be added to the email list through the FTP site and generally they should also be on your contact list on the secure site. This is a sample email from the Clearinghouse's secure FTP email box. Again, only individuals on the FTP email list will receive these emails. If you are an individual that uploads files to the Clearinghouse or should be aware when these files have successfully been uploaded, you would want to be included on the email list throughout the enrollment reporting process. Contacts at your institution may receive various email notifications from the Clearinghouse pertaining to your enrollment files and here are some examples of when you may receive an email from the Clearinghouse. Some of these emails are automated and some will directly come from an individual person. If you're not receiving emails from the Clearinghouse and your contact profile has the correct rules applied, we would recommend escalating this to your IT department just to check for firewalls or spam settings and whatnot. Some of these examples are file formatting issues, when the file is received, when error report is posted for review, if a file has been retrieved or returned, general questions or concerns coming from an analyst, late reminder emails and when the file has been processed. There are additional emails such as the newsletter or if you signed up for Compliance Central but these are just you know some of the general examples. Once the enrollment file has successfully been submitted to your institution's FTP account, it is set up for the Clearinghouse analyst to review. If there are any errors present on the file, the error report will be posted to the web for review and the submission data and submission data alternate contacts will be notified through email that the error report is available. And this is a sample of what that email would look like. Part three of our enrollment reporting webinar series will cover the actual error resolution report process. Based on what we covered today here are some reporting best practices: we recommend that you submit on time and in sync with your submission schedule and file type, identify and ensure students that should be reported on enrollment files are on the file with accurate campus and program enrollment data, keep your submission data and submission data alternate contact updated, ensure emails from the Clearinghouse can be accepted to your inbox and of course contact School Ops at studentclairinghouse.org or 703-742-4880 with any questions related to Enrollment Reporting. Of course our general Clearinghouse customer service number is 703-742-4200. However, this 4880 will take you to the data operation phone queue. So if you know it's related to Enrollment Reporting, you can dial the 4880 number, but other Clearinghouse Services, you can always dial the 4200 number. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to us 703-742-4880 or SchoolOps@studentclearinghouse.org. If you have any concerns with updating your contact list or if your user administrator has any issues with updating the contact list please feel free to reach out to us we can assist making the updates. Thank you.