Student Financial Aid Systems

The Education Department has made limited progress in integrating its National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), which tracks loan and grant data and prescreens applicants for eligibility and student loan status, with other student financial aid databases that support title IV programs. Neither NSLDS nor the other systems were designed for efficient access to reliable student financial aid information. Many of the systems are incompatible and lack data standards and common identifiers. Inhibiting movement toward a fully functional, real-time, integrated system is the absence of a systems architecture--a structure for incorporating major systems development into an existing information systems environment. The Department so far has not devoted the time or the effort needed to develop such an architecture. Without a systems architecture and the ability to easily integrate its systems, the Department continues to acquire independent systems to support specific student financial aid programs--programs that cannot easily share information. Hence, the cost to develop and maintain these stand-alone systems continues to mount.

GAO noted that: (1) the Department of Education has made only limited progress in integrating NSLDS with the other student financial aid systems that support title IV programs; (2) this is largely because the Department has not developed an overall systems architecture, a framework needed to allow these disparate systems to operate in concert with each other; (3) as a result, while information can be shared among systems, the process is cumbersome, expensive, and unreliable; (4) further, the lack of a systems architecture allows the proliferation of individual stand-alone systems; (5) this is expensive, not only with respect to system procurement, operation, and maintenance, but also in terms of efficiency; (6) such an approach has served immediate program needs on a limited basis, but undermines sharing of student financial aid information across programs; and (7) this, in turn, can result in different databases containing different and perhaps conflicting information on the status of student loan or grant.