I keep getting told I'll lose my financial aid, but I think the advisors I'm talking to are wrong

Paying for College
1

Okay, so the SAP for financial aid at my college is a 2.0 GPA and a 75% completion rate. I did not know about the completion rate, so I dropped classes and ended up with 4 Ws for the whole year. After it was too late, I decided to start looking into what would happen to my financial aid and how I would get it back. I was ecstatic when I read the SAP policy document and found this:

Transfer Courses – Courses accepted for credit at the University of Houston from another
institution—which meet the college’s transfer policy—are counted in the total credits attempted
and completed. Grades for transfer courses are not calculated in the GPA. Courses at proprietary
and trade schools will generally not be accepted for credit towards degree or certificate
requirements.

See, I have 37 hours of credit from another college. That would mean my completion rate is above 75%. I wanted to verify that I was reading the document right, so I went to the financial aid advisors to talk to them. I didn’t show them the document, I just asked them if the credit counted. They said it did not. I figured I was reading it wrong.

So for the past several weeks I have been thinking I’d lose my Pell Grants and federal loans. Today I was reading the requirements to keep a University scholarship I was rewarded, and saw that it only had a GPA requirement. So I wanted to know if I would still get the scholarship even though my SAP wouldn’t be met. The financial aid advisor said no. She said I would lose all my financial aid from them.

So once again, completely at a loss with myself and how I got myself in this situation, I spent the next 30 minutes or so trying to see if there was a way I could make the classes up over the summer or something. I then found a link on my financial aid account for the school and when I clicked it, it said “SAP status: Meeting SAP.” I knew this was from the first semester, but if they only counted UH hours I should have had a less than 50% completion rate. So I started researching again. Finally I found this:

Will my transfer credit count toward the quantitative measure of my academic performance?
Yes, the law requires that we consider ALL course work accepted by the University in our calculations of the ratio of courses completed and cumulative hours. However, transfer credits will not help improve your cumulative GPA at UH.

So that meant that I was originally right and I would meet my SAP and not lose my aid. My question now is, I really want to make sure I’m right. What law are they talking about? Is it federal or state (I’m in Texas)? Where can I find it and read it? I’m not going to feel at ease until I do.

I apologise for the very long post, but I just don’t want to miss something and lose my financial aid.

2

You need to call the Financial Aid Office and ask them.

3

My D’s scholarship has both a GPA requirement and being a full time student (12 credits or more).

4

In the real world, what a bunch of strangers on the internet tell you does not matter AT ALL.

Make an appointment with financial aid- and you can ask to have a supervisor attend the meeting since your issue is complicated- and sort it out. It doesn’t seem as though you have ever had someone (your adviser, the Dean of transfers) review your transcript from the previous institution and determine which courses WILL transfer and which ones won’t. That’s a decision that every college makes on its own.

You are banking on all those credits transferring- which you can’t possibly know from reading a policy statement. That’s something that gets determined by reading YOUR transcript, and translating what you did at another college and figuring out if the new college will accept the credits.

Sometimes students take remedial work (taking a class they never had in HS, for example) freshman year. It might be on your transcript-- but it doesn’t mean you’ll get credit for it now. Etc.

So get hopping. Sit down with financial aid, have ALL your paperwork with you including every document from your last college, and start getting it sorted out.

5

Yes, having a bunch of credit hours from another institution doesn’t count unless and until you actually have those credits transferred and accepted by your current institution.

In addition to Satisfactory Academic Progress and GPA requirements, many forms of financial aid (in particular I think federal aid) requires that you are considered a full time student each semester, which means completing at least 12 credit hours each semester.

For example if you end up completing only 8 credits in the spring semester, you would not be considered a full-time student for that semester, even though you completed 16 credits in the fall, and thus an average of 12 credits for the year. In this case, you would lose your financial aid for the spring semester.

6

Like with @mommdc 's daughter’s scholarship, the college at which I work requires 12 credits to be considered a full time student. (16 credits is considered the normal load.)

Without 12 credits, you lose
-financial aid,
-NCAA DIII athletic eligibility,
-campus housing (this is my college specific rule and could vary at other institutions).

If you dropped below the number of credits required to be a full-time student, you are indeed probably going to lose your financial aid. Because of this, at my college, academic advisors are required to sign off on any withdrawals, and there is language on the form spelling out the 12 credit rule. We try to raise as many warning flags as possible and make it impossible for students to make this drastic decision without understanding the consequences. In most cases, it is actually better to get a D or an F in a course than to drop below 12 credits.

7

Well, a D maybe, but an F doesn’t really help…

8

If you don’t have satisfactory academic progress at your school, you are at risk of being put on probation and losing your funding. Make an appointment with your school’s FA office.

9

I think the bigger question is…why did you need to withdraw from four classes?

10

I am a financial aid director, and I know my school’s SAP policy backward, forward and inside out. What I do not ,know is any other school’s policy. You need to talk to your financial aid office.