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U.S. Department of Education Uses WebFOCUS to Accurately Allocate Billions of Dollars of Student Aid
Information Builders' Business Intelligence Technology Helps Colleges Award Nearly Two Billion Dollars of Federal Pell Grants During the 2007-08 Year
| Source: Information Builders
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - March 25, 2009) - Information Builders, an independent leader in
business intelligence (BI) and integration
solutions, today announced that its customer, Federal Student Aid, a
division of the United States Department of Education, has successfully
rolled out the Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) Analysis
Tool to 200 colleges and universities across the country. The tool helps
these educational institutions assess the accuracy of student aid
applications and determine eligibility for need-based aid such as grants,
subsidized loans, and work-study programs.
FSA oversees the distribution of massive amounts of federal money to
students. The 150 schools participating in the Quality Assurance Program
are required to use the BI tool to monitor the accuracy of these awards.
These schools deliver approximately $2 billion in Pell Grants each year.
Billions more in federally subsidized loans as well as state and
institutional grant aid are awarded based on the financial information
students provide on aid applications. Previously, schools would collect the
students' financial aid data on their own, and then attempt to analyze it
using a variety of distinct systems at each campus. Now FSA personnel, and
all of the participating colleges and universities, use the tool to analyze
their data under one highly effective system.
"We can now analyze real-time data using common reports in spite of the
schools' disparate systems," said Anne B. Tuccillo, senior
management/program analyst at FSA. "By using the ISIR Analysis Tool,
schools can ensure that the right aid is being distributed to the right
students. The tool also helps schools to prevent hundreds of millions of
dollars in potential improper payments within the Federal Pell Grant
Program."
These substantial savings stem from better procedures for verifying the
accuracy of students' Free Applications for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), a
form that millions of students fill out each year. The reports generated by
the ISIR tool allow schools to identify which FAFSA items are most likely
to be misreported, which groups of students are most likely to make errors
on the form, and which errors are most likely to affect eligibility for
need-based aid. A recent FSA study determined that if Pell Grants were
awarded with no verification at all, they would have awarded nine percent
of grant recipients too much aid and six percent of grant recipients too
little aid -- a potential discrepancy of more than $600 million among the
150 schools participating in the Quality Assurance Program. The ISIR
Analysis Tool allowed schools to prevent most of the potential 15 percent
error rate by verifying the students most likely to make mistakes on their
initial applications.
"With an increasing emphasis on online communication in government offices,
FSA looked to increase the effectiveness of its interactions with both
students and colleges, while simultaneously decreasing the cost of that
enhanced communication," said David Rhodes, senior management/program
analyst at FSA. "BI technology is at the heart of these efforts." FSA
selected Information Builders' WebFOCUS BI platform because it combines
intuitive dashboards and drillable reports with complex analytic
capabilities that casual business users can quickly comprehend. "WebFOCUS
is powerful enough to handle hundreds of thousands of records from schools
across the nation and process all of that information through standard Web
browsers," he added.
In the past, many financial aid departments at post-secondary institutions
focused their verification efforts on the neediest students within their
school populations. This seemed like a logical strategy, until the ISIR
Analysis Tool helped FSA determine that errors on these student
applications typically are not significant enough to change their
eligibility for aid. This meant that schools were essentially wasting their
time by asking students and their families for financial information that
rarely led to any meaningful change in their eligibility. The ISIR Analysis
Tool helps financial aid professionals use their time more wisely as they
become more selective in students they decide to verify and which data
elements to confirm. For example, the Field Change Report lists items on
the FAFSA that are most frequently changed after the application
verification process. Tracking this information allows schools to discern
which items their students are most likely to answer incorrectly, enabling
financial aid staff to specifically target those items for verification.
Schools can also use this information to improve their community outreach
and education efforts as they help new students fill out the FAFSA
correctly.
"The ISIR Analysis Tool has enabled us to do some very in-depth analysis of
the students we verify, thus giving us the information we need to focus on
data elements that are most error-prone," confirmed Janet Roecker,
associate director, Office of Student Financial Aid, University of Kansas.
"The tool has definitely made our verification process much more
efficient."
The FSA recently launched a demo site so that interested schools could
"test drive" the BI environment before they sign up to use it. Their goal
is to increase the user base to at least 500 schools in the next two years
and ultimately to engage 1,500 post-secondary institutions throughout the
U.S.
"The ISIR Analysis Tool allows me to easily import records for analysis,"
added John McPherson, associate director of Scholarships and Financial Aid
at Ball State University. "Once records are loaded, the built-in reports
and point-and-click menus allow me to see immediate results. We have been
able to use the data to modify processes and streamline communications with
our students."
About FSA
Federal Student Aid, a performance-based organization within the U.S.
Department of Education, ensures that
all individuals who meet the eligibility standards of the needs analysis
formula created by Congress can benefit from federally funded or federally
guaranteed financial assistance for education beyond high school. FSA plays
a central role in supporting postsecondary education by partnering with
postsecondary schools, financial institutions and other participants in
Title IV Student Financial Assistance programs to help students and their
families to afford education beyond high school.
About Information Builders
Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence
and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions
to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the
world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides
the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global
extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical,
and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users.
Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state of the art,
multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA,
application, data and information management requirements. Its integration
adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers.
Together, these products give Information Builders' customers the ability
to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S.
federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices
worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business
partners. More information is available at
http://www.informationbuilders.com.