Maintaining Your Eligibility For Financial Aid
Many financial aid programs are offered with conditions that the recipient meet certain conditions and eligibility requirements to keep funding or continue receiving funds in future years. If you accept financial aid, it is your responsibility to understand any such requirements applicable to your funding programs and ensure you meet these conditions.
Maintaining your eligibility can sometimes be confusing, but the Office of Financial Aid is here to help you confidently navigate the process. We recommend you speak with your financial aid advisor regularly to ensure you understand and are working to fulfill your obligations.
Satisfactory Academic Progress
Federal regulations and Emory University policies [PDF] require financial aid recipients to make satisfactory academic progress (SAP) while they are receiving funds, meaning they must proceed toward successful and timely completion of your degree requirements. These requirements apply to anyone who receives federal, state, or university aid. If you are subject to SAP requirements and fail to meet the expectations for your program(s), you risk facing financial aid probation, a denial of aid, or both.
If you receive a merit-based scholarship, you must meet any academic conditions required by the scholarship program.
Each university school and division set its own required standards for continuing a program of study. Please reach out to your school's academic advisors for more details about these requirements.
Federal Verification
The Department of Education randomly selects FAFSA applicants for a process called verification. If your application is selected for verification, the Office of Financial Aid will ask you to provide supporting documentation, such as federal tax forms, which will allow us to audit and confirm your FAFSA data. Documentation requests appear in the Emory student portal, OPUS, on the Task tile. Additionally, you will be notified via email (sent to the address marked as preferred in OPUS) of required documentation.
If, during this process, we find a discrepancy between your application and the additional documentation, the office will be required to make changes. All changes will be submitted to the Federal Student Aid Processor. These corrections may change your federal Expected Family Contribution (EFC)/Student Aid Index (SAI) which is used to determine eligibility for federal financial aid. Corrections made to FAFSA data will generate a new electronic Student Aid Report (SAR) which you will receive from the Department of Education. The new SAR will highlight changes made by Emory University.
If you are asked to submit materials for verification, you must do so before the end of the term for which aid has been offered. If you fail to meet this deadline, your offered need-based federal aid – including the Federal Pell Grant, the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, a Direct Subsidized Loan, and Federal Work-Study – will be cancelled. If you complete verification after the deadline you may be able to receive federal funds, contingent on meeting all other eligibility requirements.
If, while completing a verification, the Office of Financial Aid suspects that a student, employee, or anyone else has misreported information or altered documentation to fraudulently obtain federal funds, we will report this assessment and any supporting evidence to the US Office of the Inspector General.