NEW Student Financial Aid Subject Area in Cal Answers

May 17, 2018

Cal Answers Financial Aid dashboards moved to new Student Financial Aid subject area

The Financial Aid and Scholarship team partnered with Cal Answers to create a new subject area, Student Financial Aid, to accommodate data from both the Student Information Systems (SIS) and the legacy system ProSAM. We moved the existing Cal Answers Student Financial Aid and Student Affordabilitydashboards (previously found under the subject area Student Financials) into the new subject area. You can use these dashboards to answer questions such as:
  • What are sources of student support?
  • How are fund sources changing over time?
  • How many students in my department or division receive Pell grants?
  • Do current financial aid programs serve students at all levels of financial need?
  • What are historical trends in the rate of borrowing and the amount borrowed?
Cal Answers Student Financial Aid Subject Area
The Student Financial Aid subject area includes two dashboards: Student Financial Aid and Student Affordability.
  • The Student Financial Aid dashboard is consistent with the version that previously resided in the Student Financials subject area and now provides access to data from both the Student Information Systems and legacy systems. It includes the following reports for financial aid years 2010-11 through 2016-17 which can be filtered by aid year, semester, grad/undergrad, education level, entry status, residency status, dependency status, and family income range:
    • Financial Aid Awards by Source: award amounts paid to students by the source of the funds: Federal, State, UC, external entity
    • Financial Aid Awards by Category: award amounts paid to a student by the category of the award: scholarship/fellowship, grant, loan, work-study, waiver, etc.
    • Financial Aid Award Details: comparative distribution of awards paid by source and type across aid years (as data becomes available)
    • Financial Aid Profile by Income: award amounts paid to students in defined family income ranges, by source and type
    • Legacy versions of the reports listed above: data available for aid years 2010-11 through 2015-16; also includes the legacy Financial Aid Summary by Major dashboard
  • The Student Affordability dashboard contains metrics from the ProSAM legacy system that assess the affordability of a UC Berkeley degree, including federal debt levels at graduation, for students who graduated from Berkeley between 2010-11 and 2015-16. At this time, there is no plan to load data for additional cohorts of students.
Training
Check out the existing Student Financial Aid Wiki to learn more about the reports and definitions of key terms. Review the Student Data Subject Area Map for a visualization of the changes.

Access
You can log in to the dashboards from the Cal Answers home page. Access to the dashboards is available to all Cal Answers users.

Questions
If you have questions about using Cal Answers, please contact the Cal Answers Help Desk at 664-9000 ( option 1, then option 2) or calanswers-help@berkeley.edu.
Thank you,
Cal Answers Team
Office of the Vice Chancellor of Finance

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