Cost of Attendance

Cost of attendance can be fully customized to your institution's needs for packaging, federal Pell Grant calculations, and loan processing. Once you define the rules for each cost at your institution, PowerFAIDS then automatically calculates your students' cost of attendance. Additionally, the number of cost of attendance categories and items you can define is unlimited, so each student's cost of attendance is specific to their situation.

In PowerFAIDS, a student's institutional cost of attendance is dependent on the payment periods assigned to the student record. Rather than requiring annual cost of attendance amounts, PowerFAIDS allows you to specify costs on a term-by-term basis. By considering expenses for each payment period separately, students can enroll in any combination of payment periods and the correct cost of attendance will be calculated. Additionally, in cases of unique circumstances requiring professional judgment, you can easily make manual cost of attendance adjustments for an individual student.

Pell Grant Cost of Attendance

Similar to the institutional cost of attendance, Federal Pell Grant cost of attendance is composed of individual items associated with your defined categories. However, federal Pell Grant costs are handled separately from institutional costs in PowerFAIDS to comply with federal regulations. Rather than being set up at the payment period level, Pell Grant cost of attendance categories are set up at the academic year level to generate a yearly budget. Additionally, in line with federal regulations, PowerFAIDS also generates both a full time total and a less than halftime total for the federal Pell Grant cost of attendance, so categories that are not available to less than halftime students are not included in their cost of attendance calculation.