Publication Date: January 7, 2002
Author: General Manager: SFA Student Channel
Summary: 2002-2003 Application Processing Start Up
Posted on January 7, 2002
To: EDE Destination Points
From: U.S. Department of Education, Student Financial Assistance
Subject: 2002-2003 Application Processing Start Up
We are excited to announce the start up of the 2002-2003 Application Processing System on January 1, 2002!
DAY ONE PROCESSING
The FAFSA on the Web (FOTW) and all other related sites were implemented at 12:01 a.m. CST on January 1st. A student from Pennsylvania filed the first record, a Renewal FAFSA, at 12:33 a.m. CST.
On January 2nd, we did our first processing run and everything went smoothly. The Central Processing System (CPS) picked up 521 records from the web, processed the results for 177 of those applications, and sent the appropriate ISIRs to your destination point. The remaining applications required signatures and could not be processed at this time.
For 2002-03, the CPS will pick up input records (such as web applications and your electronic corrections) around 2:00 a.m. We will send these records right to the match agencies, get those results, and complete the processing including sending your ISIRs by approximately 7:00 p.m. each night. Student Aid Reports (SARs) and SAR Acknowledgements will be printed starting the same day as well. We expect this process to provide you and your students with more timely results and service.
Some of the 177 applicants provided an e-mail address with their FAFSA and Renewal FAFSA data. These students were sent an e-mail informing them where to view their SAR on the Web.
We printed and mailed PIN mailers to students who had an 01transaction and were never sent a PIN mailer. Applicants who provided an e-mail address were provided a PIN via e-mail instead. We don't include the PIN itself in the e-mail for security reasons. Rather, we provide a URL the student can click on to access their PIN on-line.
DAY TWO PROCESSING
The remaining 344 web filers who still needed signatures will be processed when signature pages are received. The MDE started submitting signature pages on January 4, 2002.
As we did last year, if the student is still pending signatures but did provide an e-mail address with the FAFSA data, s/he got an e-mail from SFA stating we are holding their application pending a signature and how they can resolve that to speed up the processing. You can determine which students have listed your school and have pending signatures by viewing the HOLD03OP files sent daily to all destination points. This file contains demographic data about the student including the e-mail address.
STATUS OF 2002-03 RENEWAL APPLICATIONS
We printed 5,441,856 paper Renewal Applications, which will be mailed by January 9, 2002. Ninety-five percent were mailed before the end of December. Additionally, from the Renewal Application process, we reprinted 4,017,637 PIN mailers, which had been provided in previous mailings, and the last of these are in the mail this week.
EDEXPRESS STATUS
The US Department of Education wishes to alert all EDExpress users that the release of 2002-03 EDExpress Version 8.0 has been delayed until mid-January 2002.
A notice will be sent via IFAP when Version 8.0 of EDExpress is posted on the SFADownload web site. The web site is http://www.fsadownload.ed.gov/index.htm.
IFAP & APPLICATION PROCESSING MATERIALS
We also tried to make it easier for you to find documents that are related to the FAFSA application processing system. If you go to the IFAP website (ifap.ed.gov) and click on "Current Publications by Title," you will see that we have created an Application Processing area. When you click on that link, documents beginning with the 2002-03 processing cycle are listed in chronological order. We will continue to post the various documents (such as electronic announcements, Action Letters, etc.) to their respective locations on IFAP, but in addition, we will be cross-posting any document that relates to the FAFSA, Renewal FAFSA, FAFSA on the Web, SAR or ISIRs to this new central site. We hope that you find this new location easy to use as you search for information related to the 2002-03 processing cycle.
WISHING YOU A GOOD YEAR
All the new initiatives listed above were part of presentations at our Electronic Access Conferences. If you were unable to attend one of the conferences or missed a session, please go to the EAC conference web site http://fsaconferences.ed.gov/ where you can download the presentations in PowerPoint format.
We look forward to a very successful year in 2002-03 and want to thank you for your support and assistance in making changes that benefit your students when they apply for federal student aid.