The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), bolstered by a grant from the Lumina Foundation, has developed a website to benefit students whose colleges closed while they were enrolled or shortly after they withdrew.
The website, NextStepsEd.org, is an online ticketing portal which allows students to connect “with a seasoned financial aid advisor from a NASFAA member institution,” according to the site’s mission statement.
NextStepsEd was developed after big institutions of higher education, such as the for-profit Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech, ended their academic programs as well as the recurring financial questions students come across when they withdraw or an institution closes in the middle of the term.
“It left a lot of students without a home in higher education, and in particular a lot of questions about their financial aid and what would be available and what wouldn’t be available to them,” said Megan McClean Coval, vice president of policy at NASFAA. “So there was a real need for these students to get information — and get accurate information — from financial aid professionals. So that’s why we decided to engage in this.”
The Lumina Foundation pitched in $214,800 to help students understand their financial options and direct them toward their next educational decisions. The grant began in December 2016 and will last until New Year’s Eve, 2018.
Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation based in Indianapolis that’s dedicated to making opportunities for education beyond high school available to all. Its goal is “to prepare people for informed citizenship and for success in a global economy.”
“We [Lumina and NASFAA] were encouraged that the previous administration took steps to create a process by which students disrupted by a school closure could be made whole and can get back on a path to completion, but this new process is unfamiliar, fairly opaque, and potentially difficult to access for many affected students,” said Zakiya Smith, strategy director at the Lumina Foundation.
