Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs)/Dear Partner Letters (DPLs)

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ED distributes Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs) and Dear Partner Letters (DPLs) to schools, lenders, servicers, and guarantors to provide interpretive policy guidance about the federal student aid programs. Typically, ED issues a DCL or DPL to provide interim guidance after Congress reauthorizes the Higher Education Act or between releases of final regulations. Recent and archived DCLs and DPLs are available on the Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP) Web site.

What do a DCL's numbers and letters represent?
Each DCL has a specific ID number. The ID number has three identifying components: the type of letter, the year, and the sequence number.

Take, for example, ID number: GEN-09-04, which corresponds to a DCL that focuses on the financial aid administrator's ability to exercise professional judgment. The type identifies the intended audience of the letter. In this case, type "GEN" means that the letter is intended for general distribution. The "09" portion of the ID represents 2009, the year in which the letter was published. The number "04" indicates that this was the fourth letter released for general distribution in the year 2009. This last number changes as ED publishes new DCLs throughout the 2009 calendar year (e.g., GEN-09-05, GEN-09-06). This number starts over at "01" at the beginning of each calendar year for all types of DCLs.

Listed below are the types of DCLs that ED publishes:

General Distribution (GEN)
Training Announcements (ANN)
Campus-based Programs (CB)
Pell Grant Program (P)
Financial Partners (FP)

On February 17, 2004, ED simplified the DCL numbering system by merging lender and guarantor letters under one type of letter — Financial Partners (FP). Before this date, the types of letters that ED had published for lender and guarantor issues were as follows:

Guarantor (G)
Lender (L)

It may be useful to keep these older DCL types in mind when researching lender and guarantor issues prior to the change.

For more information, visit www.ifap.ed.gov.