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Financial Aid

Orientation Overview watch

Follow along as Becky Fant provides a brief overview of services from the Financial Aid office.

Hi, this is Becky Fant. I’m with the Financial Aid office at Texarkana College.

We’re going to visit with you a little bit about the different financial aid and scholarship programs here. We also do your veteran services, loans, student loans. So anytime you need any of this, you’re just going to come by and see us.

So one of the first steps for financial aid is your FAFSA, so you’re going to want to complete the FAFSA. It’s going to depend on the current year you’re in, and you’re going to need to go to the fafsa.gov website. It’ll take you straight over. It’s still there and you’ll need to create an FSA ID and be sure and keep the ID and a safe place ’cause you will need that the next time you sign in.

We want you to know that about half of our students get selected for verification. So don’t panic if you get an email from us because you’re just one of the others because it’s going to be you and the person beside you.

So with FAFSA again, it’s going to be current year. It is going to use what we call prior – prior years taxes, so if you’re in the 21-22 academic year, it’s going to use 2019.
If you’re doing 22-23, it’s going to use your 2020 taxes.

We want you to know also that it runs August to August, which is somewhat confusing. It’s not a calendar year. It’s August to August and be sure you check your online account because anything that we need from you is going to be sent there.

We are going to email you for your award letter.

Any correspondence that we have, and again on the bottom, it says make sure to accept your terms and conditions ’cause your award will not go on your account if you don’t accept them.

So how does Pell work? So if you are full time and you’re taking 12 or so hours, you’re going to get the full Pell Grant for that year. If you are, say, 6 to 8 hours, you’re going to be halftime, so when it your hours that are eligible load it is going to split those in half.

So just know that when you get your award letter, it is based on full time attendance, and if you’re not attending full time it will adjust your award when your hours load.

Generally, our workforce students, if they’re daytime, they are a full time student, and if you go at night, you’re going to be a part time student and our Pell does pay if you qualify for federal Pell.

It pays each semester now, so fall, spring, and summer. If you’re eligible, you would be awarded for financial aid and Pell.

What are the requirements of having financial aid? This is important so you are required to maintain a 2.0 GPA, a completion rate of 67%. So what that means is if you drop classes, it goes against your attempted hours and your earned hours.

So it gives you a little leeway for taking a class and having to drop for life reasons. Things that happen, but once you get to lower than 67%, you do have to appeal that with us.

And there’s also something called our maximum timeframe. We also call it Max credits, and it looks at 150% of whatever degree weather it an associates or a certification that you’re looking to get.

But we can go over that some more if you get to that situation and you’ll get a notice from us that that’s where you are after the semester ends.

So we have lots of internal scholarships here at TC and we have just launched a new program so all of our scholarships are now listed under the scholarships page. And if you’ll go, it’s paying for college and scholarships. It’ll launch you to our website that has all of our scholarships and we do have external scholarships and Miss Pam from the business office is going to visit with you about that.