Financial Aid Compliance Case Study

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Pages: 3

All institutions of higher education must comply with federal regulations. Regulations may differ from college to college depending on whether it is private or public, but each school must budget the implementation of these regulations in their overall costs. In a case study conducted by Vanderbilt University, they estimated that overall each intuition complied with 30 different areas of regulations and over 200 federal laws and guidelines (Moran, 2015). “The study estimates of that $27 billion, $17 billion was incurred due to higher-education and all-sector compliance, while $10 billion was estimated to be a result of research-related compliance (Moran, 2015, P.1).” In this short essay, I will focus on accreditation and financial aid compliance …show more content…
In essence accreditation holds institutions accountable by verifying if they’re complying with the standards of higher education and if they’re fulfilling the values and ethics of the school’s mission statement. Direct and indirect costs of accreditation can annually cost colleges between $32,000 to $41,000 per year depending on the length of the accreditation cycle (Whelan & Elgart,2015). Accreditation costs come from annual fees, collection, and processing of peer reviews, paying roughly $2,500 per consultant per day for accreditation visits, consultant travel expenses, etc (Whelan & Elgart,2015).
Accreditation can be a costly mandate but it’s necessary in order to evaluate student support and overall effectiveness within an institution. In order to compensate for some of these expenses, colleges can collect peer reviews electronically to save on paper supplies, and use a processing program instead of hiring personnel to sort and analyze data. Colleges can also save money by implementing internal auditing instead of utilizing an external agency to ensure that all documents are correct prior to