If you work in higher education, particularly in the for-profit sector, you’ve likely heard that the “Ability to Benefit” or AtB program is ending this year. As a result of federal budget cuts, students without a high school diploma or GED will no longer be able to obtain Pell Grants if they enroll in college after July 1, 2012.

While the elimination of AtB is not the only change to the Pell Grants program this year*, it is arguably the most significant one, directly impacting access to education for some of the most needy, and underserved populations in the country.

AtB has allowed colleges and universities, particularly in the for-profit sector, to provide crucial training for low-income, low-skilled students – a market typically underserved by traditional schools. With the elimination of this program, those schools may need to make changes to both their program offerings and their recruitment efforts.

AtB Checklist for Schools

At CUnet, we are supporting a number of our clients through this change, helping them to understand the impact of the elimination of AtB, develop a plan to address the change, and finally look for ways to fill the void that will be left when these students are no longer able to access the necessary support to allow them to enroll in higher education.

If your school currently serves AtB students, you should start by considering the following questions:

• What % of your students are AtB students?
• Are you currently generating inquiries from AtB students?
• If yes, what % of your inquiries are AtB students?
• Have you made plans to stop the generation of AtB student inquiries? If yes, are you taking a phased approach?
• Do you need to find new sources of inquiries to replace the inquiries you have eliminated?

If you currently receive inquiries from AtB students, you may need to alter your media mix to address this Pell Grant change. Shifting over to affiliates specializing in high school graduates is an obvious approach. However, now is also a good time to consider other recruitment channels, including paid search, mobile and call products. With just over two months to go before the program is eliminated, it’s important to start transitioning now.

Finally, you should consider how your school can continue to serve and support the ATB market – an important group that desperately needs access to education to advance in their careers and lives. What creative initiatives can your school develop to support this group? Perhaps you can offer free GED study sessions in your cafeteria? We’d love to hear your ideas and plans to continue to address the needs of this group. A little creativity may result in loyal students who, GED in hand, now qualify for Pell Grants.

*Additional July 1 changes to the Pell Grants program include:
· Maximum duration to receive grants decreased from nine years to six (effective retroactively)
· Maximum annual income to qualify reduced from $30,000 to $23,000

As a follow-up to yesterday’s compliance webinar post, we are excited to announce that CUnet is providing schools with the opportunity to get a free compliance audit in order better assess their current compliance risks and needs!

What’s involved?

By requesting this free compliance review, one of CUnet’s Marketing Operations Quality Control (MOQC) analysts will meet with your team to review your existing compliance process, and gather URL’s in order to identify potential compliance violations.

How do we do it?

CUnet will load the URL’s into our Sparkroom Monitor system to identify areas of risk. Any banned or required terms that you provide to us will also be entered to generate overall page scores for a more accurate risk assessment. It’s an easy way to see if CUnet can help you!

The Sparkroom Monitor tool will do the following:

· Actively crawl the pages to monitor and take snapshots of changes on the page- Each URL will be monitored by our crawler and will flag any change that happens to the page. Each time a page is altered, a screenshot is saved in the page history, and the change of the page will be labeled – whether it is a program removal or addition, or a change in the school copy.

· Flag suspicious or banned terms that appear on the page, as well as required language that is missing from a page – Sparkroom Monitor recognizes and highlights general terms that put schools at risk as well as any terms that our clients specifically provide that should not be allowed to be used under their brand. This also works the other direction. Any content that is required on a page, such as a school’s privacy policy, that is missing from the page will also be flagged.

· Create ‘Scores’ of risk on each page based on the criteria of what’s getting flagged- For any term that is flagged, a numerical risk score is assigned to create an estimate of how much risk each page contains.

· Organize the data for the MOQC Professionals to conduct future manual audits - The MOQC professionals review and audit each URL periodically giving the quality control that can’t be completed with technology alone. If a school chooses to utilize CUnet’s compliance services, any brand guidelines, required information, copy, or legal information that a client provides us with will be audited by the MOQC team aided by the previously listed features of the Sparkroom Monitoring tool. The MOQC team will then create compliance violation tasks that need to be created, and approve that the violation is corrected.

Where do I sign up?

If you are interested in taking advantage of this compliance audit, please contact Jeff Herz (jeff.herz@cunet.com) at 201-477-7793

Last week, we hosted the latest in our series of Market Insights webinars. It was awesome! This time around, we focused on compliance and presented the findings of the Compliance Survey that we conducted in fall 2011.

Didn’t get the chance to join in? Not to worry…there will be another amazing webinar soon! Just so you don’t feel left out, here’s a handy-dandy recap of some interesting statistics that were unveiled:

• Last year, 96% of schools added new staff resources to address compliance
• Not everyone is ready to deal with the Department of Education’s integrity regulations; nearly 1 in 5 schools has not even updated their compliance guidelines (so if you haven’t, you’re not alone!)
• 86% of schools have renegotiated contracts with vendors in response to the regulations. Schools are now holding their vendors more accountable, demanding transparency and exerting more control
• Schools are demanding that vendors react quickly to compliance violations, with 69% requiring major violations be resolved in less than 24 hours

But, perhaps most insightful was learning that while everyone recognizes the need for compliance monitoring, only 31% of survey respondents have implemented a comprehensive compliance monitoring solution (using both manual and automatic processes) at their school.

As you might have guessed, we have a solution for those schools who need some help devising and implementing their comprehensive compliance processes; stay tuned for our next post to find out more!

And if you’re interested in viewing the recorded version of last week’s webinar, check it out here.

In July 2011, the Department of Education passed a series of new regulations targeting for-profit schools which have a significant impact on recruitment. These regulations created the need for agencies like CUnet to place a greater focus on compliance, and help schools become more transparent for prospective students. At that time, CUnet committed itself to becoming a leader in the quickly-evolving area of compliance through significant investments in:

People: Dedicated internal team of compliance specialists

CUnet responded to this challenge by forming the Marketing Operations Quality Control (MOQC, pronounced: MOXIE| MOK-see|) team in Lincoln, NE and hiring 13 associates to focus exclusively on creating and implementing our compliance practice. We also dedicated a team of developers from our Toronto, ON office to focus on extending Sparkroom, our industry-leading platform, to track our client’s affiliate networks and ensure compliance guidelines are being met.

The MOQC team is made up of Analysts and Professionals who are responsible for manually reviewing websites, looking for issues, and creating compliance violations; marking them as major or minor based upon client standards. The MOQC team also proactively identifies and monitors the internet for fraudulent or “blackhat” activity in order to attack compliance violations on all fronts for our client base.

Processes: Clearly defined set of operational processes to monitor, enforce, and address misrepresentation

CUnet’s MOQC team manages the following  processes :

   -    Creating & managing compliance guidelines

   -    Conducting automated monitoring

   -    Performing analyst reviews

   -    Tracking & communicating violation alerts

   -    Providing in-depth reporting

   -    Performing periodic audits

Technology: Significant investments in technology solutions, backed by our industry-leading Sparkroom platform

The Sparkroom Monitor software supports the compliance team by storing URL information for monitoring, crawling the URLs daily, and comparing URLs against previous records. When Sparkroom Monitor detects changes within the URLs, it takes an image snapshot for analysis. The system also records when manual audits are performed by the MOQC team and scores all media objects (URLS) to help the MOQC team quickly prioritize their tasks; flagging client designated banned terms, and automatically tracks the differences in pages that occur over time.

We’ve got a lot of cool things going on this week at CUnet, with the Annual APSCU Convention at the center of it all. To kick things off, this morning we made a couple of announcements that we’re really excited about. These announcements reflect our commitment to helping our customers better manage their compliance requirements in light of the upcoming regulatory changes, and they also mark the beginning of an ongoing plan to build and execute on a comprehensive compliance roadmap.

First, we launched CUnet’s new, fully managed compliance monitoring solution, known as CUnet Enforce. This managed service was designed to give schools a turn-key solution to allow them to easily monitor, manage, and enforce regulatory compliance across all their marketing campaigns. With CUnet Enforce in place, schools can ensure their brands are represented appropriately, while responding to the impending regulatory changes with peace of mind.

As part of this announcement, we also introduced CUnet’s recently-named Director of Marketing Compliance Products. Yihan Fang is a senior leader in Internet search with over 10 years’ experience, and we are thrilled to be adding her to our executive team. You can read the full announcement here.

Finally, we also launched a new compliance feature as part of our industry-leading Enrollment Marketing Automation platform.  By integrating the PerformMatch API into the Sparkroom platform, CUnet is giving higher education marketers seamless access to compliance verification data for inquiries. The new compliance feature will give schools access to a screen shot and compliance score for each individual inquiry, providing a verification and audit trail that will make it easier to monitor and manage marketing campaigns for compliance.

If you’re at APSCU, we hope to see you at our booth (#1119) where we’ll be giving away an iPad every day during the conference.  You can’t miss us – we’ll be the ones in the transparent booth!