To keep their federal financial aid, Mississippi State University students must prove they have attended classes. If they have withdrawn from classes, they are required to give the government its money back.
Bruce Crain, the director of financial aid at Mississippi State, gave an example: Students who withdraw from school after 10 percent of the semester must repay 90 percent of their financial aid.
This system results from a new interpretation of Title IV in the Higher Education Act, which created the federal financial aid program in 1965. The law about repaying federal aid passed in 1998, but universities only recently started implementing it according to the new, more literal interpretation.
Rebecca Dixon, Northwestern’s associate provost for university enrollment, said this interpretation applies to a small fraction of colleges whose students have chronic attendance problems. It would be unnecessary and impractical to implement at schools such as NU, where 91 percent of students graduate, she said.
Critics of the rule also consider it impossible to enforce, and some view it as an invasion of privacy to require students to prove that they attend class.
But the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State are two of several schools that have started taking the rule literally.
Mississippi State has two ways of checking student attendance. First, if financial aid recipients officially withdraw from school, they may have to repay the government.
In the second scenario, students unofficially withdraw from the university by ceasing to attend class. Students get F’s and the university determines when they stopped going to school.
The rule is posted on the university Web site and on financial aid award letters. According to Crain, the school is handling it well.
“We do as good as the rest of the schools,” he said. But when it comes to asking a student to repay financial aid, “it’s not an easy thing to do.”
Of 16,000 students, about 60 from last semester owe financial aid repayments.
“If you’re one of those 60, it’s a big thing,” Crain said. “It’s very important to be aware (of the laws).”
If NU students officially withdraw before the middle of the quarter, they might be entitled to refunds if they did not get financial aid. If they did, they might have to repay it, Dixon said.
NU students also must repay financial aid if they have fraudulently filled out forms. The university validates the information students have submitted, Dixon said.
NU is only responsible for current students, but if alumni are discovered to have falsified information, NU is required to disclose documents on them, too.
Every year, federal auditors review NU’s financial records as part of normal procedures. NU has not had any problems with the return of Title IV funds, she said.
