We will kick off the Workshop with a fun activity to get the day started.

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This session will provide financial aid administrators with an overview of the United States tax systems, including a look at the income tax, employment taxes, and gift and estate taxes, with a focus on how these interact with higher education costs. Topics covered will include taxable vs. tax exempt income, the standard deduction, who can be claimed on someone else’s tax return, taxation of a dependent’s earned and unearned income, how taxable business income is determined, taxation of scholarships and grants, and what the gift and estate tax are and how they are related to each other. The goal of the session is to provide information to allow aid

administrators to better understand a family’s financial situation and understand many of the terms they are likely to encounter when processing applications or counseling current and prospective students. The session goes beyond the basic information the Department of Education obligates financial aid administrators to understand.

Verification consists of three parts: selection, FAFSA data to be reviewed, and acceptable documentation. In this session, we will look at the first two of these. We will start with a look at the difference between Verification and Conflicting Information and the difference between Department of Education selection and institutional selection.

We will identify the FAFSA data to be verified in Group V1, when the Federal Tax Information (FTI) added to the FAFSA by the FA-DDX is considered verified (and more importantly, when it is not), and where the FAFSA data appear on the 2024 tax return.

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The FAFSA Simplification Act changed the way Pell Grant eligibility is determined, and the July 4, 2025 Reconciliation Act changed it further. In this session we will look at the three-step process currently used to determine an applicant’s eligibility for Pell Grant (Maximum Pell, Calculated Pell, and Minimum Pell) and how these have changed for 2026-2027. We will also look at the students who are most likely impacted by the change from using AGI to using AGI plus the foreign earned income exclusion as the income factor in the Maximum and Minimum Pell Grant comparisons, and if there are ways to mitigate these changes.

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Coming soon!

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General overview of withdrawal and Return of Title IV process.  Will the new 2026-27 rule changes leave a sour taste in your mouth?

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Audit-ready doesn’t have to mean human-absent. Whether you’re an advisor or a director, the strength of your office lies in the community you build. This session introduces a relational framework designed to help every staff member navigate campus politics, block burnout, and boost retention. By prioritizing community over processing, we create a resilient, high-performance team where staff want to stay, and students succeed.

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An understanding of how the FAFSA data come together to become the Student Aid Index is important for financial aid administrators to understand, especially when it comes to professional judgment. In this session, we will review hypotheticals request from students for an adjustment based on changes to their or their family member’s income or assets – and learn how to estimate the impact the change would have on the student’s aid eligibility if we decided to use professional judgment to account for the change. Understanding this process can help FAAs manage their appeal workload, since many requests from students and parents, even if a professional judgment is warranted, will not result in a change to the student’s federal aid eligibility or create Pell eligibility. Let’s see if we can predict in advance whether the adjustment the student or parent is requesting will result in more funding for the student.

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Although the Student Aid Index (SAI) and Maximum and Minimum Pell Grant eligibility rules are critically important when determining a student’s eligibility for Title IV aid, many financial aid administrators (FAAs) do not understand how these calculations work. MASFAA (Massachusetts) introduced an SAI Hand Calculation contest at its 2024 annual conference, and both CASFAA (California) and MASFAA included the contest at their 2025 conferences. Contestants are given ISIR data, the SAI Formula Guide calculation sheets, the SAI Formula tables, the “Applicant Required to Report Assets” rules, and, depending on the time allotted for the contest, the base year poverty guideline tables, and challenged to determine an applicant’s SAI, and eligibility for Maximum and Minimum Pell grant as quickly as possible.

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