Enrollment Reporting Process Cycle

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) began using the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) to track and monitor all student loan borrowers and grant overpayments. ED incorporated Enrollment Reporting into the NSLDS to centralize and fully automate the enrollment verification system. Enrollment Reporting through NSLDS significantly streamlines the entire enrollment confirmation procedure. At the same time, it can optimize the frequency of scheduled reporting cycles and, therefore, the timeliness of the data.

The list below describes the entire activity, step by step, showing which participant is responsible for each step. Regardless of how many times you elect to report, each cycle must include the following steps:

1. NSLDS:

   1. Generates the Roster File for your institution.

   2. Forwards the Roster File to you.

2. Your institution:

   1. Receives the Roster file.

   2. Matches the Roster File against registration files.

   3. Updates each student's enrollment status and effective enrollment status date with valid codes on the Roster file, as defined in the NSLDS Enrollment Reporting Guide.

   4. Proposes changes to student identifiers (student's SSN, last name, first name, middle initial, and birth date) as needed.

   5. Changes or adds student permanent address data as needed.

   6. Adds a detail record to the file for each new student as needed.

   7. Checks that the updated file contains valid data, as defined in the NSLDS Enrollment Reporting Guide, to reduce the likelihood that NSLDS will find errors.

   8. Returns the updated Roster File, now called the Roster Submittal File, to NSLDS within 30 days of the date it was sent to the institution.

3. NSLDS:

   1. Receives the Roster Submittal File.

   2. Edits (error-checks) the Roster Submittal File contents.

   3. Updates the NSLDS database with enrollment status changes.

   4. Captures proposed student identifier changes and new or changed address data.

   5. Returns the Error/Acknowledgement File, which includes any records containing errors, applicable error codes, and a count of accepted and rejected records, to your institution for correction. If there are no errors, the file contains a count of accepted records and no detail records.

   6. Forwards the new and changed data to each affected data provider (such as GAs and Direct Loan Servicer).

   7. Monitors the timeliness of your institution's response, following up if necessary.

4. Your institution:

   1. Receives and saves the Error/Acknowledgement File.

   2. If all records were accepted by NSLDS, considers the Enrollment Reporting cycle complete. Corrects any records with identified errors.

   3. Returns the corrected records to NSLDS as the Error Correction File within 10 days of the date it is sent to the institution.

5. If your institution returned an Error Correction File, NSLDS:

   1. Receives the returned Error Correction File.

   2. Edits the returned Detail Records.

   3. Repeats steps C3 through C7 for the returned Detail Records.

   4. Sends a revised Error/Acknowledgement File to your institution.

NSLDS begins the next cycle by generating a new Roster File reflecting all changes accepted from the last Roster, including unresolved errors from the previous cycle.