Financial Aid Refund Checks

It has been a few weeks since my last blog post which can be directly attributed to the rush of Fall registration. Over the past few weeks I have been getting numerous comments and questions every day through this blog that pertain to financial aid. These comments have been wonderful and I am very appreciative for all of your feedback. Recently though, the vast majority of these comments have surrounded one topic: REFUND CHECKS. This is the time of year for financial aid refund checks to go out so I wanted to shed a little light as to how these checks work.

The basic concept is that if you are awarded financial aid over and above what your tuition costs are, you may be eligible to receive that overage in the form of a refund check, which you can then use to cover other educational expenses (IE. housing, transportation, textbooks, personal expenses). Many of you may be wondering if you have a refund check available. The simplest way would be to consult your award letter. If you have awards showing on your award letter that total up to more than your tuition costs are, more than likely, you will receive that amount in a refund check. You also can check your account summary on Campus Cruiser which will show an updated amount of a refund. It is important to note, that not all types of aid are able to be refunded to students. Lottery tuition assistance can only be used to credit tuition and many scholarships have a stipulation that they cannot be refunded to the student. So if you have a question about your particular refund, please contact our office at financialaid@gvltec.edu

The majority of students who receive some form of a refund, do so by obtaining a student loan. Student loans are processed differently than grant and scholarship aid and therefore, the refund checks are also processed differently. Scholarships and grant aid are automatically applied to student accounts on our disbursement date which is 9/8/09 for the Fall 2009 semester and 2/1/09 for the Spring 2010 semester. Loans are also disbursed on that date, but only if they have been certified. The certification process takes 4-6 weeks from the date that you turned in your award letter. When we certify a loan we send a request to the lender that you have chosen, and request the loan amount that you have signed for on your award letter. Once the money is released from your lender, those funds come to us and we then transfer those funds to our business office for them to process a refund check.

Our business office legally has 10 business days to process a refund check. This means that even after your financial aid has been credited to your account, it may still be up to 2 weeks before your refund is actually mailed out or direct deposited. Our business office sends out refunds every Friday. For the Fall 2009 semester the first batch of refund are slated to be sent out on September 18^th, 2009. Refunds will be sent out every Friday after until the end of the semester.

I hope this answers some of the questions that I have heard regarding financial aid refund checks. As always, if you have further questions do not hesitate to leave a comment and a financial aid advisor will respond as soon as possible. Thank you for your time!