A task force of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators on Monday submitted proposed revisions in its ethics documents to its members for their feedback.
The proposed changes deal with financial-aid issues that have been raised or amplified in recent years, including transparency about college costs and how student data can be used.
The task force will incorporate member feedback as it sees fit and submit final recommendations for the association’s board to vote on in late March.
The association, known as Nasfaa, adopted its Statement of Ethical Principles, which it asks members to strive to meet, in 1999. A Code of Conduct, which members are required to observe, was added in 2007.
Nasfaa has an important role in shaping the profession’s standards, said Justin Draeger, its president. “If we don’t police ourselves and hold ourselves to the highest standard,” he said, “we’re inviting others to do it for us.”
Over the years, both the financial-aid profession and its association have come under scrutiny. The profession’s reputation took a hit in the wake of an investigation into conflicts of interest between colleges and lenders. The association’s most-recent former president resigned in 2009 after being charged with misusing public funds and making illegal campaign contributions in a previous job.
In the years since, the new issues have cropped up for the profession, and the proposed revisions deal with some of them.
Members of Congress, as well as officials in the Education Department and the Obama administration, have expressed concern to Nasfaa about how open colleges have been about their costs, said Mary S. Sommers, who leads the task force. That helped set the backdrop for the group’s work.
Debate Over Award Letters
One proposed addition to the documents concerns financial-aid award letters. Advocates have said for years that colleges should be required to follow a standard format in the aid-award notifications they send to students. Nasfaa, which had a separate committee look at the issue, has taken a different position: that colleges should be free to customize the letters, but the letters should contain standard elements.
A proposed addition to the Statement of Ethical Principles says that award notices “must accurately display both billable institutional charges and nonbilled allowable expenses.”
The use of student data has emerged as another hot topic. The task force wanted the ethics documents to help members who might butt heads with others on the campus about the use of student data. “There is a desire for financial-aid administrators to have some backup with their senior administrators,” said Ms. Sommers, who is director of financial aid at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Ms. Sommers pointed to the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s standard that colleges permit first-year candidates for fall admission to take until May 1 to choose a college as a successful example of how a professional association can serve in this role.
The proposed revisions in the Statement of Ethical Practices provide more detail than the previous version did, stating that information from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid is to be protected and “only used for the application, award, and administration of aid awarded.”
Some colleges use Fafsa data to gauge students’ interest in enrolling, which could affect admissions decisions. And aid professionals have also been known to worry about colleagues in the development office who want a sense of which students come from families who can afford to pay.
Other proposed changes are meant to serve as guidelines for members who are deciding whether to take on an optional activity, like creating a preferred-lender list, Ms. Sommers said.
Mr. Draeger doesn’t expect the proposed changes to stir up much controversy among the group’s members. For most, he suspects, the real challenge will be carrying out whatever changes the board adopts. But the association, he said, will be there to help them.
