Federal Updates

ED issues announcement about guidance applicable to Hurricane Rita
On September 25, ED issued the following announcement on its Information for Financial Aid Professionals website (the information is included below in its entirety for convenience).

ED releases revised discharge, forgiveness forms
ED recently published Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs) GEN-05-11 and GEN-05-12 announcing several revised loan discharge and forgiveness forms.

TG Updates

Meet Gail Worry, service representative for loan guarantee operations
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the financial aid community has acted quickly to help stranded students find alternate schools and additional student financial aid. Fast action has allowed thousands of students to continue schooling without much disruption. How could so many schools and lenders accomplish this feat in such short notice? Because the enormity of the disaster demanded it, and because financial aid professionals are dedicated to the same goal — providing access to education. One such team of professionals is TG's loan guarantee operations (LGO).

TG releases bookmarked file of complete 2005-06 FSA Handbook
Now that ED has released Volume 3, Calculating Awards and Packaging, of the 2005-06 Federal Student Aid Handbook (FSA Handbook), all of the volumes of the current version of the FSA Handbook have been published. To assist customers in using the FSA Handbook as a whole, TG has combined all of its volumes into one easy-to-use, searchable PDF.

Question of the week
Where can I find a list of TG edit codes for loan guarantees?

Trends and Issues

The in-school consolidation "aftermath": Cohort default rates
Shoptalk Online concludes its series on the implications of the in-school consolidation rush that occurred earlier this summer. This final article in the series concerns the potential impact that in-school consolidation may have on a school's cohort default rate.

This, That, and the Other...

Claiborne deBorda Pell is probably best known to those of us in the student financial aid community as the senator for whom the Pell grant was named. But, do you also know that Pell was the longest-serving U.S. senator in Rhode Island's history (for 36 years from 1961 to 1997)? During his time in Congress, Pell took a leading role in breaking down financial barriers to education with legislation that created the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, renamed the Pell grant by Congress in 1980.

Pell's motto, "Translate ideas into actions that help people," is positively exhibited in his record on education reform, environmental policy, health care programs, arts and humanities funding, and foreign policy. Pell is quoted as saying, "The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people." As a living testament to his words, Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island established the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy by an Act of Congress in 1996 to perpetuate the senator's life work of advocating world peace and an educated public.