How Do We Construct the Cost Of Attendance For The Summer Payment Period?

Note that there are two uses of the cost of attendance (COA): the full-year full-time COA that is always used for determining Federal Pell Grant eligibility—which cannot include costs for a non-mandatory period such as an optional summer—versus the COA used in the calculation of financial need for the purpose of awarding all other types of Title IV aid.

Schools determine what the amounts should be for each COA component, so using a prorated amount of these costs that you use for the defined academic year is likely to be defensible. Once determined, you would apply these prorated costs to each student’s summer enrollment.

The construction of a student’s COA for enrollment during an optional summer payment period likely needs to be handled differently than for the other terms in your school’s defined academic year. Note that the same requirement to use the EFC associated with a student’s length of enrollment also applies to the COA—that is, the COA cannot include costs for periods of nonattendance.

When constructing the student’s COA, you need to consider the various summer sessions your students could be enrolling in. The COA you assign for the payment period must align with the student’s duration of enrollment. If the only options for enrollment are courses that span the entire term, with maybe only a few modules within the term to choose from, then this could be a fairly straightforward exercise. On the other hand, if your summer term is comprised of multiple modules combined into a single term, then a different approach will be needed for any students who are not continuously enrolled for the entire payment period. While the categories of tuition and fees, books, course materials, supplies and equipment, and loan fees, aren’t usually affected by breaks in enrollment, almost all of the other COA components could be. In practice, we believe many schools identify a monthly budget amount, and then multiply that amount by the number of months during which the student will be enrolled; however, this is not the only approach possible and you should use a method that makes the most sense for your student population.

The methodology you use needs to be spelled out in your policies and procedures, and then applied consistently. 

For a more detailed discussion of Cost of Attendance, refer to Volume 3, Chapter 2 of the FSA Handbook. You may also find it helpful to refer to NASFAA Monograph: Developing the Cost of Attendance, under Tools & Resources on the NASFAA website.

Note: Effective with the 2023-24 award year, the COA component for “room and board” has been renamed "living expenses." "Room" has been renamed "housing" and "board" has been renamed "food." Additionally, the COA component for “books and supplies” has been renamed “books, course materials, supplies, and equipment.” See Section 472 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), as amended, [20 USC 1087LL].