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Though ED has yet to issue final guidance, the Perkins Loan Program is scheduled to expire on September 30, 2015 without congressional action. Of the approximately 300 responses to our informal survey on Perkins, 47 percent selected "We will continue to service outstanding loans once the program ends," 34 percent selected "We are not awarding any Perkins loans to new borrowers for the 2015-2016 academic year," 34 percent selected "Other" and six percent selected "We have already begun the process of closing out our Perkins Loan Fund (ceasing our participation in the program) under existing regulation by assigning outstanding loans to the Department of Education."

NASFAA's AskRegs Knowledgebase allows NASFAA members to search and browse for answers to financial aid regulatory and compliance questions submitted by NASFAA members. More than 30,000 searches are performed on the knowledgebase each month. But with more than 3,000 active Q&As, the numbers of search results can sometimes seem overwhelming. That's where the "advanced search" feature comes in. Learn how to refine your searches in AskRegs to find the information you're after.

Updated for 2015-16, this one-pager lists loan limits for the Federal Stafford, PLUS, and Perkins loan programs. Also listed are the minimum and maximum award amounts for Pell Grants and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and the limits and eligibility requirements for the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grants. Download the PDF, print it out, and hang it up at your desk so you have the information you need right at your fingertips throughout the year.

"... College affordability has become a nearly universal concern among American families — even those [...] with two parents working in good jobs. Despite this, it’s a slippery concept to pin down," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports."Part of the problem is that there are really two college-affordability conversations happening, says Justin Draeger, president of [NASFAA] — one among policy wonks, and another among the public."

"Two recent changes in NCAA rules are resulting in major-college athletes receiving more than $160 million a year in additional benefits, a USA TODAY Sports analysis has found," USA Today reports. NASFAA President Justin Draeger "said he doesn't have any evidence of an athletics department manipulating cost-of-attendance numbers or pressuring a financial aid office to do the same. What he does have is 'an enormous amount of newly found interest in how schools come up with their cost of attendance.'"

"The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) has selected the winner of its inaugural 'Big Idea' policy proposal competition," Campus Technology reports.

"Virginia Murphy borrowed a small fortune to attend law school and pursue her dream of becoming a public defender," the Wall Street Journal reports. "Now the Florida resident is among an expanding breed of American borrower: those who owe at least $100,000 in student debt but have no expectation of paying it back."

"At the start of each semester, the financial aid money appeared in Sana Ahmed Malik’s account. The federal and state funds typically covered the cost of tuition, with a little left over for books and living expenses. But the fall of her fourth year at Georgia State University, something wasn’t right," PBS NewsHour reports.

"Four years after graduating from Syracuse University, Dan Kaplan’s first priority each month is to pay his student loans, hindering his plan to save for an emergency fund or to buy a car. ... While this dedicated approach has helped him whittle down the amount of his debts so that they will be paid off by early 2016, Kaplan has also felt the strain of not having a personal rainy day fund for unexpected expenses or other goals such as buying a vehicle or 'an eventual home of my own, which has really started to hit home as friends and family members around my age have begun buying these things,'" TheStreet reports.

"College was never much of an option for most students in this tiny town of 1,200 located in the woods of the Manistee National Forest. Only 12 of the 32 kids who graduated high school in 2005 enrolled in college. Only two of those have gotten their bachelor’s degree," according to The Atlantic.

"With his parents out of work and an office job paying his bills, college junior Shane Bang remembers the anxiety he felt when his younger brother told his family he was headed to University of Washington in the fall," Reuters reports.

"Hillary Clinton's plan to alleviate student debt has merit, but additional measures are needed to solve the college debt crisis," Steven R. DiSalvo, president of Saint Anselm College, writes in an opinion piece for The Boston Globe.

"... In comments submitted last week to the U.S. Department of Education, the Center for American Progress Postsecondary Education Policy team detailed its support for numerous improvements to the proposed REPAYE plan," the Center for American Progress writes.

"The federal consumer bureau on Monday launched an industry-wide investigation to determine why borrowers with federal student loans are being kicked out of generous programs that keep their payments affordable," The Huffington Post reports.

"A college degree is often billed as the golden ticket to a better career and a bigger salary. But at what price?" Molly Triffin writes in LearnVest.

"The value of higher education has never been greater, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis," according to U.S. News & World Report's Data Mine.

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