Federal Updates

Updated information available pertaining to Hurricane Katrina
Since last week, there have been a couple of developments pertaining to Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the administration of federal student aid.

Reauthorization watch
TG has updated its Higher Education Act reauthorization page on TG Online with information and links on recent developments

TG Updates

TG receives award for excellence in customer service
Providing excellent customer service is a cornerstone of our business practice of caring for our customers. Our dedication to customer service recently was recognized with a local business award.

Texas Tech simplifies award notification process with TG Awards By Web™
Packaging financial aid awards for all of your students often is the busiest time of year in the financial aid office. But once packaging is finished, notifying your students of their financial aid awards — and getting them to respond to them in a timely fashion — can be an equally time consuming process.

Skill builders: Avoiding the poison grapevine
Remember in junior high when you and your classmates would sit in a circle and you would whisper something in the person's ear next to you, and then that person would whisper it to the next person and so-on, until it made its way back to you?

Question of the week
Q: What is the definition of delivery and disbursement in association with FFELP loans?

Trends and Issues

The in-school consolidation "aftermath": Counseling students
After a two-week hiatus due to the news surge related to Hurricane Katrina, Shoptalk Online continues its series on the implications of the in-school consolidation rush that occurred earlier this summer. This week's article concerns how to counsel students who have consolidated while in school.

This, That, and the Other...

Known as "helicopter parents" for the way they hover over their children's lives, many of today's super-involved parents are becoming increasingly bold in phoning school administrators to complain about their children's dorm rooms, roommates, and grades — and many colleges are beginning to take a firmer stance against them. According to an Associated Press article, baby-boomer parents have become so heavily involved in their children's lives that college administrators believe the parents are hindering the educational process and preventing their children from solving their own problems, a necessary step in becoming independent adults. To find out how some colleges are dealing with the issue, you can read the August 29 article at www.cnn.com/2005/ EDUCATION/08/29/ helicopter.parents.ap/ index.html.