Mastering Enrollment Reporting to NSLDS isn’t hard, but you’ve got to understand the dates. What’s the difference between the submission date, effective date and certification date?

The third Electronic Announcement we received from ED last month provides a thorough discussion as well as examples of the differences between the dates used in NSLDS for processing student enrollment data.

Schools are required to report enrollment data to the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) at least every 60 days. Schools are required to certify the enrollment status of all students who appear on the NSLDS Enrollment Roster sent to the school (or its designated third-party servicer), either in batch or online using the Enrollment Maintenance page of the NSLDS Professional Access website. Schools are strongly encouraged to add a new or transfer student who has received Title IV aid at another school, even if the student is not receiving aid at the new school. Many schools report enrollment information monthly, which NSLDS recommends as it allows for more current enrollment status changes.

Enrollment Status Effective Date is the date that the current enrollment status reported for a student was first effective.  This date only changes when the student’s enrollment status changes, for example, when the student drops from full time enrollment to half time enrollment. The Enrollment Status Effective Date remains the same as long as the student stays continuously enrolled in the same enrollment status, and is reported with the same Enrollment Status Effective Date when the student most recently entered that status.

The Enrollment Status Effective Date should not be automatically updated each term or each year, or with each NSLDS Enrollment reporting, unless the student’s enrollment status changed since the last reporting. Enrollment Status Effective Date, and its related enrollment status, must be reported for both the campus level and the program level.

Certification Date is the date the school certified the enrollment information.  The Certification Date, which changes with each reporting submission, roughly corresponds to the date the school (or its servicer) processes its NSLDS Enrollment Roster, and normally changes with each enrollment reporting submission to NSLDS.  Note that to ensure that the reporting is correct before NSLDS removes a student from the school’s Enrollment Roster, the terminal statuses of G, W, X and Z must be certified in two consecutive reporting cycles with different Certification Dates but with the same effective date.

Received Date is not reported by schools, but is the date NSLDS receives (from a school or its servicer) the school’s Enrollment Roster and updates the enrollment information on NSLDS.  This date appears on various pages of the NSLDS website and is used for informational purposes and in the calculation of enrollment reporting statistics.

The Electronic Announcement provides a number of additional examples illustrating how these dates are used in various enrollment scenarios. For more information read the EA here: http://bit.ly/2pMZFGc

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