Frequently Asked Questions

They can access PowerFAIDS Cloud via a web browser on a computer, tablet, or mobile device.

PowerFAIDS Cloud is designed to be full screen and responsive, which means it resizes to the target device. It is also WCAG 2.0 accessibility compliant. Screens are simplified, with simpler language and labels. Contextual information brings clarity to users in understanding the data they are looking at and the next logical action to take.

PowerFAIDS Cloud expands on the features offered by PowerFAIDS Desktop. PowerFAIDS Cloud is not a reproduction of current state PowerFAIDS. Features users are most excited about include support for broader higher education models, a student centric design, and tools to increase financial aid office productivity.

PowerFAIDS Cloud has multichannel student engagement. Net Partner, the current student portal, is currently being completely redesigned and rebuilt. This starts with a brand-new mobile first design. In addition, text messaging is being introduced as a communication option.

User advice and feedback has guided PowerFAIDS development since its inception 30 years ago. PowerFAIDS Cloud provides new opportunities to address school needs and requires deep engagement with the financial aid community. Most recently, College Board broadened the PowerFAIDS advisory group to 32 members—more institutional inclusion means we can address a wider array of financial aid needs. The PowerFAIDS team has also introduced quarterly webinars that include Q&A and feedback opportunities, as well as a monthly newsletter.

Yes. Either an institutional student ID or an SSN is required, but not both.

Yes. PII is masked and only users which the school has authorized are able to unmask.

Each editable field in PowerFAIDS Cloud, including custom data, contains a lock. The lock prevents any process, including System Driven Updates, from updating the field. Every entity (for example, a row in the cost of attendance or an award on the aid package) contains a shield. The shield prevents the entire entity from being updated by System Driven Updates.

Early adoption is underway for the 2024-25 award year. General adoption is slated to begin in calendar year 2024 for the 2025-26 award year and conclude in calendar year 2026 for the 2027-28 award year.

Schools will finish one award year in PowerFAIDS Desktop and start a new award year in PowerFAIDS Cloud. During the time period when processing is occurring in multiple award years, users will be using PowerFAIDS Desktop and PowerFAIDS Cloud simultaneously.

PowerFAIDS Cloud is the successor to PowerFAIDS Desktop. After the customer migration to PowerFAIDS Cloud is complete, PowerFAIDS Desktop will no longer be updated or enhanced.

Since each school is unique, the amount of effort will vary. The move from PowerFAIDS Desktop to PowerFAIDS Cloud will take about 12 weeks. College Board will reduce the amount of effort required to migrate by providing a preconfigured federal setup containing the funds, selection sets, requirements, and communication templates needed for processing federal aid.

Nonfederal funds will migrate from PowerFAIDS Desktop toPowerFAIDS Cloud. PowerFAIDS Cloud comes with federal funds, cost of attendance categories, requirements for COD System processing, requirements for verification with associated selection sets, requirements for ISIR comment codes and C-Flags requiring resolution with associated selection sets, and communication templates as part of the preconfigured setup.

Select information for continuing students from your last production cycle in PowerFAIDS Desktop will move to support your first production cycle in PowerFAIDS Cloud.

Schools may choose to maintain the data in PowerFAIDS Desktop indefinitely for reporting purposes, migrate the data to another system for storage/reporting, or purge the data according to the federal data retention policies.

Yes. If a school is not exclusively using out of the box integration with our partners, they will need to create new integration.

Reports that are executed from within PowerFAIDS Desktop will not be migrated to PowerFAIDS Cloud and will need to be rewritten. PowerFAIDS Cloud is built with a new database schema and does not maintain a one-to-one relationship with PowerFAIDS Desktop.

PowerFAIDS Cloud is powered by Amazon Web Services.

Data is stored on Amazon Web Services in the United States. Each school owns their data.

As a cloud-based application, College Board is able to update PowerFAIDS Cloud more often than PowerFAIDS Desktop with more frequent, but smaller, updates. This allows us to respond to urgent regulatory changes quickly. As major new features are deployed, they are disabled by default to prevent any disruption to a school’s processing workflow. Schools cannot opt out of releases. College Board pushes updates out to schools with no action required by schools.

At a minimum, schools will have one sandbox environment for training and testing.

College Board is ISO 27001-, ISO 27002-, and SOC 2-certified, which means College Board already passes high levels of security scrutiny.

College Board has selected the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT) questionnaire as our response to security questionnaires. As explained by EDUCAUSE, this tool helps higher education institutions ensure that cloud services are appropriately assessed for security and privacy needs, including some that are unique to higher education.

PowerFAIDS Cloud integration revolves around three facets. The first is out of the box integration with partners who offer systems in the higher education spaces. The second is robust APIs for campus IT to take advantage of in order to achieve integration with other cloud-based and campus-hosted systems. The third is a CSV file import to support bulk data transfers and to support campus IT and financial aid offices not yet ready to take advantage of APIs.

College Board is pleased to partner with various higher education vendors to provide standard integrations between PowerFAIDS Cloud and other systems.

Yes, PowerFAIDS Cloud will support single sign-on for both campus staff and students. Single sign-on is not required.

Schools can do both if they use single sign on and those features are supported by their identify provider.

For schools using PowerFAIDS Cloud credentials, MFA will be provided and enforced. Supported MFA applications include Duo Mobile, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and Symantec VIP Access. The option to use a physical token will be supported. For schools that have opted to use single sign-on, MFA is handled through their identify provider.

College Board is committed to maintaining out of the box integration with partner vendors and is working with vendors to ensure seamless integration.

PowerFAIDS Cloud will integrate directly with other College Board products so that end users don’t need to transfer files between products.

The PowerFAIDS API has been designed to use OAuth 2.0 standards that support the use of open source libraries to authenticate.

The PowerFAIDS API is designed to be used for a variety of purposes but excels at smaller, near real-time data updates.

Yes! The PowerFAIDS API is designed to support working with one or more student records at a time, so you can perform batch operations with a single call. This includes data retrieval as well as create and update flows.

Yes! The PowerFAIDS API can handle large jobs without interruption, and even provides the ability to perform a high-level status check on these large jobs.

The PowerFAIDS API is modeled on the Student Information Import file layout to ensure consistency and parity between these two methods of data transfer. However, the API also allows read-only access to a variety of areas that are not included within the Student Information Import such as ISIR data, aid package data, and disbursement data.

Yes! The PowerFAIDS API has access to admin entity definition data and even things like tokens, code lookups, and custom fields.

No. The API for PowerFAIDS Cloud has fewer endpoints than the legacy PowerFAIDS Desktop API to increase efficiency and decrease implementation complexity. This also means that you can retrieve, create, or edit full student records from a single endpoint.

No! The PowerFAIDS API is designed in a way that allows you to configure the data sets that you want to work with and provides additional flexibility to meet your needs.

Yes. Schools will be able to connect to a read only database and execute SQL. See the feature roadmap for the estimated delivery of this reporting option.

Yes. Schools will have access to all student and administration data points.