(GENERAL-22-65) NSLDS Professional Access – Additional Information About the Modernized Website #7

Author
Federal Student Aid
Electronic Announcement ID
GENERAL-22-65
Subject
NSLDS Professional Access – Additional Information About the Modernized Website #7

Through a series of Electronic Announcements published since June 2022, we have provided Federal Student Aid’s (FSA’s) professional partners with transparent information before and after we implemented the modernized National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS®) Professional Access on July 25, 2022. That enormous initiative included overhauling underlying system platform and architecture and standing up a new contact center to support daily operations and customer service. We appreciate the financial aid community’s patience and understanding as we have validated and fine-tuned this important undertaking over the past several weeks.

In this announcement, we provide further updated information about NSLDS enrollment functionality, NSLDS postscreening, issues identified since launch, and resources.

For more information, please refer to the sections below.

Updated Information for NSLDS Enrollment Functionality

We know that processing issues with NSLDS Professional Access since July have significantly affected a school’s ability to adhere to institutional enrollment reporting requirements—especially at this time of the school year. We are focused on the issues, remain diligent in our efforts to resolve them, and continue to appreciate the patience of our professional partners.

Without diminishing the importance of accurate and timely reporting of students' enrollment status information to NSLDS, we are continuing our suspension of all NSLDS enrollment reporting compliance notifications. Schools, school servicers, and enrollment providers should retain copies of this announcement and our Aug. 31 announcement as documentation for audit purposes. The Print button at the top left of each announcement can be used to print a formatted version of the announcement to paper or PDF.

Below is a summary of the enrollment-related issues identified to date.

Open Issues

  • New! Enrollment History Update Functionality Suspension:  We have identified issues that require us to temporarily suspend Enrollment History Update functionality. We are working with the National Student Clearinghouse and individual schools to fully research these issues and appreciate their assistance. We will share more information as soon as possible.

    Our focus as we resolve the identified issues will be to ensure that a student’s current enrollment is correct on NSLDS Professional Access. As a result, there may be some gaps in the enrollment histories of affected students on NSLDS Professional Access. In preparation, schools should retain copies of this announcement and our Aug. 31 announcement as documentation for audit purposes.

    Note: Schools, school servicers, and enrollment providers can continue to submit updates to current enrollment information via the Enrollment Maintenance page and the Update Enrollment page on the NSLDS Professional Access website.

  • New! September Enrollment Rosters: As announced on Aug. 31, 2022, we did not begin disseminating September Enrollment Rosters on Sept. 1 as anticipated. We will inform the community when we are ready to disseminate those rosters.

  • New! Roster Schedule Preferences: We have seen some inconsistencies with roster schedule preferences within NSLDS Professional Access. We are fully researching this issue and will share more information as soon as possible.

  • Program Duplication: We identified an issue with enrollment processing that is causing a student’s program to appear in duplicate and the certification of that student’s enrollment to be disallowed. We are fully researching this issue and will share more information as soon as possible.

Resolved Issues

  • Online Warning Messages: Some messaging previously appeared on the NSLDS Professional Access website warning that a school was delinquent or otherwise non-compliant with enrollment reporting requirements. That online messaging was released inadvertently and subsequently removed from the website.

  • Enrollment Roster Headers: As previously reported, after we disseminated outstanding July and August Rosters we discovered an inadvertent error related to the rosters sent to enrollment providers who manage different OPE IDs. We corrected the issue to prevent it from happening going forward. In addition, we recreated and resent corrected versions of the July and August Rosters in response to enrollment provider requests.

    Note: In most cases, the Enrollment Roster Header includes a school’s OPE ID in the File Content ID (an optional field); however, the rosters we sent included “SERVICER” instead of the school’s OPE ID. There has been no change to the roster layout, and it is okay for affected enrollment providers to send OPE ID in Headers and Trailers despite the inadvertent error.

  • Cancellation of Enrollment Spreadsheet Submittals Made July 20 – Aug. 8: All spreadsheet submittals during this period were canceled and show as “Failed” on the NSLDS Professional Access website. We emailed affected schools about the canceled spreadsheets on Aug. 11. It was necessary for affected schools to re-upload the spreadsheets for processing.

Reports and Guide

  • NSLDS enrollment reports targeted to be available on July 25, as described in the July 22 announcement, are available on the NSLDS Professional Access website.

  • We will notify the community when the forthcoming NSLDS Enrollment Reporting Guide is available.

Updated Information for NSLDS Postscreening

We continue to make progress with identifying and resolving issues related to postscreening; however, as announced on Aug. 31, 2022, we did not resume our weekly postscreening cadence by the end of this week, as anticipated. We will inform the community when we are ready to resume postscreening. In the meantime, a school could execute an online lookup via the website; however, we acknowledge that the online lookup option is not practical for large volumes of students.

Issues Identified Since Launch

We provide the following information about issues that have been identified since launch. We are focused on the issues, remain diligent in our efforts to resolve them, and continue to appreciate the patience of our professional partners.

Open Issues

  • Printing: We identified an issue with the internal formatting parameters of the NSLDS Professional Access website that makes printing webpage content using a computer’s browser print function prohibitive. The content that prints on each page is limited to such an extent that thousands of pages generate for printing. Until we resolve the issue, schools should use a computer’s Print Screen (PrtScr) or a software product’s Screenshot (for example, Microsoft’s Snipping Tool) functionality to capture and print webpage content needed for documentation purposes. Print screens and screenshots can be saved as PDF and encrypted if they need to be retained electronically.

  • TRNINFIN Files: We are progressing with responding to school submissions of TRNINFIN files, Financial Aid History requests, and Transfer Student Monitoring inform files. We know that schools need this supplemental information to complete financial aid packaging for students. We continue to work the backlog in the order received and as expeditiously as possible. In the meantime, a school could execute an online lookup via the website; however, we acknowledge that the online lookup option is not practical for large volumes of students.

  • Reports: We are delayed in sending reports that are delivered via Student Aid Internet Gateway (SAIG) to schools. We are working this backlog as expeditiously as possible. In the meantime, a school could request a report on-demand via the website; however, we acknowledge that the on-demand option may not provide the data in the format a school needs.

  • Aggregate Limits: During our post implementation validation period, we have identified a couple of issues that are causing the NSLDS prescreening process to incorrectly flag a student as exceeding one of the aggregate limits. We are working to fix the issues as soon as possible.

Resolved Issues

  • ISIR Comment Code 132: As we previously reported, we corrected the NSLDS prescreening process that was incorrectly flagging a student as being in default on a federal student loan when the student is the beneficiary of a parent’s PLUS loan that is in default. The erroneous status no longer reflects as a Defaulted Student warning icon on the NSLDS Professional Access website. On Aug. 19, 2022, we resolved the ISIR Comment Code 132s produced across the 2022 and 2023 award years (~5,000 records) by processing and sending NSLDS Postscreening Reason Code 99 records to affected schools.

  • Perkins File Level Edits Files: We previously sent Perkins File Level Edits files (SHSNTFOP) to schools via SAIG from the wrong TG mailbox. To correct this issue, we resent the files from the correct TG mailbox. Unfortunately, we cannot remove the files that were sent originally; please ignore those files.

  • Transfer Student Monitoring Files: We previously sent Transfer Student Monitoring files (TRNINFOP, TRLTRPOP, and TRALRTOP) to schools via SAIG from the wrong TG mailbox. To correct this issue, we resent the files from the correct TG mailbox. Unfortunately, we cannot remove the files that were sent originally; please ignore those files.

  • School Perkins Loan Error Files: We previously sent School Perkins Loan Error files (SLDERROP) to schools via SAIG from the wrong TG mailbox. To correct this issue, we resent the files from the correct TG mailbox. Unfortunately, we cannot remove the files that were sent originally; please ignore those files.

  • Access: During the period Aug. 5 – 8, we experienced an issue affecting access to the NSLDS Professional Access and FSA Partner Connect websites by loan servicer and guaranty agency authorized users. We communicated resolution of this issue on Aug. 8; however, to resolve it, we needed to revert the Participation Management Database to a previous version. As such, any transactions completed from Thursday, Aug. 4 through Saturday, Aug. 6 will have to be re-entered into the system. We emailed impacted users associated with those transactions.

  • Access: During the period July 25 – Aug. 3, we experienced intermittent server issues that prohibited authorized users from logging in to the new NSLDS website. We resolved the server issues as of Aug. 3, and authorized users have not experienced access issues for this reason since then.

NSLDS Professional Access Resources

Published Information

We will continue to update NSLDS user resources, including user guides and documentation. For a period of time, some resources will contain images and instructions that do not correspond to the updated website. However, in most cases users may continue to refer to the guide or reference until an updated version is available because the resource describes an existing process that has not changed. Please contact the NSLDS Customer Support Center using the contact information below if you have questions about a particular user resource.

As a reminder, a library of brief training videos for NSLDS Professional Access users is available on the FSA Training Center. Each narrated walk-through focuses on frequently-used functionality and provides users with a high-level review of the website’s key features. To view the complete list of topics and to access the training videos, log into the FSA Training Center, choose “Systems Training” from the main menu bar, and then select “NSLDS Training.”

Contact Information

If you have questions, please contact the NSLDS Customer Support Center at 1-800-999-8219 or nslds@ed.gov.