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Student Connections: Students face challenges and opportunities before, during and after college. That’s why Student Connections offers responsive tactics and proactive strategies for promoting success in the classroom-to-career journey. Success Center offers an interactive, m-learning platform that empowers students with nonacademic skills critical to retention and completion. Learn more at https://www.studentconnections.org.

The Trump administration's budget proposal for fiscal year 2018 – which included billions of dollars in cuts to several student aid programs – has been widely panned by many in the higher education community as an attack on students. But the budget's proposed changes to the federal student loan system could bring a benefit to some students, according to a new report.

The college affordability narrative typically focuses on increases in tuition and fees, student loan debt, and other financial aid topics. But a new article in NASFAA's Journal of Student Financial Aid dives into the role non-academic costs, such as food, parking, and other expenses play in how students perceive college affordability. The authors conducted a study of undergraduates' perceptions of non-academic spending, and found the students felt certain campus policies, practices, and spaces encouraged spending, contributing to the idea that college is unaffordable. Read the full article, and explore others in the latest issue of JSFA.

NASFAA provides lots of tools and resources to help with your day-to-day work. For instance, the Compliance Engine and Policies & Procedures Builder were built to help financial aid administrators effectively manage compliance administration, the Student Aid Index is a comprehensive and searchable dictionary of all things financial aid-related, AskRegs provides a searchable Knowledgebase of answers to financial aid administrators' questions — and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Take this quick survey to tell us which NASFAA tools and resources you've used and to see what others may be useful to you.

The purpose of this information collection package—the Consolidated Annual Report (CAR)—is to gather narrative, financial, and performance data as required by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV).

In accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, the Department of Education publishes this notice of a new system of records entitled “Integrated Partner Management” system, and a rescinded system of records entitled “Postsecondary Education Participants System."

"As colleges and universities flock to take their academic programs online, many of them work with outside contractors to handle some or all of the course development, marketing and back-office management of the programs. That's even true of Harvard University, which announced a partnership with one of these online program management companies Monday," Inside Higher Ed reports.

"It's a fall tradition: Students don college sweatshirts and their parents, meanwhile, sweat the tuition bills. ... Annual tuition hikes have been pretty much a given in higher ed, but recently, there are signs that the decades-long rise in college costs is nearing a peak," NPR reports.

"Jessica Smith raised an arm and pointed across the lobby of the university student center like an ornithologist who had just spied a rare breed in the underbrush. ... It was, in fact, an unusual bird that Smith had spotted, especially on this campus: masculum collegium discipulus. A male college student," The Atlantic reports.

"Upward mobility and opportunity are at the heart of the First Generation Student experience. While definitions vary, I have defined a First Generation Student as this: an undergraduate learner whose parents did not earn a college degree,"  Troy Markowitz writes in an opinion piece for Forbes.

"Two years after Congress let the federal Perkins loan program expire — and then revived it two-and-half-months later — lawmakers face another looming deadline over how to deal with the decades-old program," Politico's Morning Education reports. "Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, tells Morning Education that he’s pushing for an extension of Perkins but acknowledges the outlook for the program is somewhat grim."

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