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(Gainful Employment) Subject: Gainful Employment Electronic Announcement #74 - Correcting GE Data Prior to the Department’s Distribution of Draft GE Completers Lists

Posted Date:May 6, 2016

Author: Jeff Baker, Director, Policy Liaison and Implementation, Federal Student Aid

Subject: Gainful Employment Electronic Announcement #74 - Correcting GE Data Prior to the Department’s Distribution of Draft GE Completers Lists

Under 34 CFR 668.404, we calculate Debt-to-Earnings (D/E) rates using the debt and earnings of students who completed Gainful Employment (GE) programs. We plan to issue D/E rates in January 2017. As part of the process for the calculation of D/E rates, we send an institution’s Draft GE Completers Lists to the institutionally designated Student Aid Internet Gateway (SAIG) mailbox, if the institution had one or more GE Programs with program completers in award years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. Consistent with the GE regulations at 34 CFR 668.405, institutions will have 45 days to submit corrections to the information included in the Draft GE Completers Lists.

Preparing for Distribution of Draft GE Completers Lists

We intend to create Draft GE Completers Lists later this month and distribute those lists to institutions by June 1, 2016. To reduce the number of corrections that institutions must submit during the 45-day corrections period, we strongly encourage institutions to, no later than May 13, 2016, report to NSLDS any missing GE Program information and make any necessary corrections to information previously reported. This will be the final opportunity for institutions to ensure that the Draft GE Completers Lists we send them are accurate and complete. Institutions should pay careful attention to previously reported attendance dates as those dates impact the loan attribution calculations used later in the process for calculating GE Debt-to-Earnings rates and cannot be corrected or challenged later.

We have posted multiple communications to the Information for Financial Aid Professionals website (ifap.ed.gov) with instructions on how to report and correct GE information. These postings include GE Electronic Announcements #59, #60, #61, and Chapter 4 of the NSLDS Gainful Employment User Guide. Institutions should refer to these resources in preparation for submitting corrections to their GE Program information as recommended in this Electronic Announcement.

Draft GE Completers List Corrections Process

The Data Challenges and Appeals Solution (DCAS) system that we had previously announced will not be used for this corrections cycle. Instead, we will use a system that most institutions are familiar and comfortable with—NSLDS—for this corrections cycle to help minimize burden on institutions.

We have scheduled two different webinars (each offered twice), as detailed below, where we will provide more information about how institutions may submit corrections to information on their GE Completers Lists.

GE Completers List Webinars

    Title: Reading Your Draft GE Completers List Files

    Dates and Times: Thursday, June 2 and Tuesday, June 7, both from 2:00 PM ET to 3:00 PM ET.

    Title: Submitting GE Completers List Corrections

    Dates and Times: Tuesday, June 14 and Thursday, June 16, both from 1:30 PM ET to 3:00 PM ET.

Please watch for an Electronic Announcement with the call-in details for these webinars.

Future GE Processes

After the Completers Lists are finalized, we will subsequently obtain and compile mean and median annual earnings information, and loan debt information, for students on the final GE Completers Lists. Institutions will receive their draft D/E rates in the future for review and will have an opportunity to challenge certain data used in the calculation of those rates. We will issue further guidance and information about these steps at a later date.

Contact Information

The Gainful Employment Information Page on the IFAP website contains publications and resources on GE as well as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). If you have a question about the GE regulations that has not already been addressed in the FAQ section of the Gainful Employment Information Page, please submit the question to ge-questions@ed.gov.