Introducing ProEd Appeal Management System (PAMS)

Under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), schools are required to spend a portion of HEERF grant funds to “conduct direct outreach to financial aid applicants and recipients about the opportunity to receive a financial aid adjustment due to the recent unemployment of a family member or independent student, or other circumstances.”

“Other circumstances are defined as “generally any circumstances that impact the ability of a financial aid applicant to afford their attendance at an institution and would therefore make the student eligible to receive a financial aid adjustment.” Basically, this includes any special circumstances that schools typically include in their exercise of professional judgment (PJ)…”

“Direct outreach’ requires an institution to actively engage financial aid applicants and recipients regarding the opportunity to receive a financial aid adjustment. Such outreach should be more than a passive notification of the opportunity to receive a financial aid adjustment, such as posting this opportunity on the institution’s website.”

The direct outreach must be a direct one-to-one individual notification to each financial aid applicant and recipient, and can include but is not limited to:

Email or postal mail
Phone or voice communication
Webinar invitations
In-person interviews or meetings

ProEducation Solutions can help institutions meet this new American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 requirement. First, ProEd reaches out to students via email, phone, text, or voice blasts to ask if any circumstances have impacted their ability to afford attendance at their institution. If students respond they need help, they are directed to ProEd’s Appeal Management System “PAMS” process.

PAMS provides schools with an electronic appeal form, appeal management workflow, and immediate student notification of their appeal results. PAMS can be utilized for processes such as Special Circumstances using Professional Judgement, Satisfactory Academic Progress appeals, Cost of Attendance adjustments, Dependency overrides, or loan requests. PAMS uses your school’s own form, converts it into an eSign document powered by DocuSign, and provides the school with a secure URL to distribute to your students. When the electronic forms are completed by students and/or parents, they are put into a managed workflow environment for further processing by either school staff (SaaS) or can be fully outsourced to ProEd’s team of highly experienced financial aid professionals (Full-Service), or both. The forms are completed directly in ProEd’s ProOne processing environment and eSigned by the processor. As soon as the processor eSigns the form and indicates whether the appeal was accepted, denied, or contained insufficient information, the entire appeal packet, along with the processor’s decision, are immediately sent to the student.

PAMS forms can be seamlessly pushed directly into a school’s imaging system or shared drive as well as stored on DocuSign’s secure servers. As an additional service, PAMS can extract data from each form into an Excel spreadsheet so the appeals can be tracked, re-awarded and reported to other school officials.

“We are pleased to offer PAMS to help students and their parents electronically file appeals due to unforeseen circumstances like the loss of income, changes in on/off campus attendance, and disruptions of their academic life causing them to not make Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP). This service will alleviate the difficulty of turning in paper appeal documents, particularly when students and financial aid staff are homebound. Specifically, it will help students to quickly file electronic appeals and help financial aid staff quickly and electronically respond to their requests. All work is performed online. During a time when so many factors are uncertain for many sectors in higher education, both affordability and administrative efficiency are essential to maintaining enrollments and revenues in the Fall.” – Dr. Paul Gilroy, President.