Spring 2025 marks a major milestone for CVC in our support for financial aid!

The California Virtual Campus (CVC) is excited to announce the release of its centralized Financial Aid (FA) Dashboard, now available to all participating colleges. This update streamlines the federal financial aid process for students cross-enrolled via the CVC Exchange and automates several, formerly manual, processes for FA offices. This milestone reflects the CVC’s commitment to creating systemwide infrastructure that reduces friction for colleges and improves outcomes for students. Our collaboration with key leaders and stakeholders allowed us to take a major step forward for cross-enrollment support across California’s community colleges—and underscores what’s possible when innovation meets collaboration.

The FA release marks CVC’s commitment to combining a technical process with the human element. After initial feedback from various constituent groups, the CVC formed a FA workgroup consisting of  directors from colleges across the system, as well as IT and admissions professionals. The workgroup provided thoughtful feedback and the CVC in turn made several product updates. Initial feedback from presentations during the Chief Information System Officers Association (CISOA) Technology Summit and the CCC Student Financial Aid Administrators Association (CCCSFAAA) conferences this spring was overwhelmingly positive and continues to be so after releasing the updates to production. 

The new workflow improves communication to students by first clearly emphasizing the eligibility requirements needed for requesting financial aid. Once the student consents to requesting aid, the request will be reviewed by a counselor at the college/district. The designated counselor will be alerted to determine course eligibility towards the student’s educational plan. After course evaluation is complete, the financial aid designee will receive a notification to determine financial aid eligibility. 

According to the Federal Financial Aid Consortium Agreement, “Per federal regulations, a student may receive federal financial aid from only one school during any given semester. The Consortium Agreement allows the degree-granting institution (Home College) to count courses being taken at the host school (Teaching College) in the aid calculation.” Students may therefore request Federal Financial Aid from their Home College FA office for classes they cross-enroll into via the CVC Exchange.

Previously, students requested aid through their Exchange dashboard and FA received an email notification with Teaching College information. FA offices were responsible for determining student and course eligibility and notifying students of their award status through email. While functional, this created informal college workflows that were outside of their typical business processes, and colleges tracked their own data around these rewards.

With the release of a centralized CVC Financial Aid dashboard (available for all colleges) in spring 2025, counselors and financial aid offices can now collaboratively determine course and student eligibility. This new dashboard improves communication and visibility to both college FA offices as well as to students. Rather than waiting for a manual email from the FA office, students will now receive an automated email with the status of their award upon final determination. Additionally, the dashboard streamlines the review process for counselors and FA offices so they are able to quickly locate relevant transfer information between the Home and Teaching Colleges, the number of units, and census dates. This second phase of the rollout will have an integrated workflow to streamline the recording of units to the Home College ERP/SIS directly for all PeopleSoft and Banner Direct colleges from the dashboard (an integration for Banner and Colleague Ethos colleges is still pending, and dependent on Ellucian development prioritization). 
An announcement was shared on the CSSO-ALL listserv on March 24, providing a form to CSSOs, and asking them to submit names of staff and counselors for dashboard training to enable the new workflow.