Financial Need Model for Students - Graduate Programs

@Kenda Fanzo We are a graduate health sciences university, and we're not satisfied with our current solution; so I'm interested in how others are dealing with this. Currently, though, we import a field into BAM we call “Gross Need.” It is a calculation of the program's Total Cost of Attendance less the student's Estimated Family Contribution from FAFSA. For those awards that require financial need, we add a Qualification that Gross Need must be greater than or equal to the award amount; and reviewers can see the Gross Need to determine which applicants have more or less need. We have discussed changing Gross Need from an actual dollar amount to a rating scale (e.g. 5 = high need, 1 = low need), but it's complicated as we have nearly two dozen different programs that each have their own cost of attendance; so a high Gross Need in one program might be a low Gross Need in another. The biggest issue we're running into, though, is that international and DACA students don't complete a FAFSA, and for them BAM shows $0 for Gross Need. This makes them ineligible for financial need-based awards.