MSU Scholarships FAQs: Administering Staff
Why is a central scholarship and fellowship solution needed?
Centralizing the scholarship and fellowship information could help automate some of these processes and reduce the number of tools and systems needed, thus eliminating mistakes and increasing the visibility and findability of scholarship opportunities for students.
Non-scholarship endowments funded by specific accounts could also be maintained in real time using the MSU Scholarships (AcademicWorks) system. Having the endowment agreements, awarding standards, accounting information, and donor data in real time would be an asset to the staff administering endowments. The current interface and navigation options make it difficult to obtain this information in a timely manner. The new system could also help provide a way for donors to access their information in a more transparent way.
How will the central MSU Scholarships system benefit staff and the university as a whole?
There is a need to provide a secure, central location for all gift and other sources of student financial aid information for each unit, which integrates into Admissions and Financial Aid offices. This will provide units with better visibility into their information, along with reporting capabilities which may not exist today. One central repository will also provide the university with one location for all gifts to better service students, faculty, and MSU’s unit administrators when looking for scholarship, fellowship, or other financial aid opportunities.
MSU Scholarships aims to increase efficient and effective stewardship of all MSU scholarships and fellowships helping the university manage these assets securely with one tool. The platform will additionally help units (starting with the pilot units) manage their scholarship and endowment data by integrating with the existing MSU Student Information System (SIS) and Kuali Financial Systems (KFS).
MSU Scholarships will help the university:
- Provide automated processing.
- Offer more robust reporting capabilities.
- Improve donor tracking and communications.
How will MSU Scholarships work?
MSU Scholarships is accessed at scholarships.msu.edu. Information about scholarships and fellowships will be available to anyone, but to apply individuals will need to log in with their MSU NetID and password.
Scholarships and fellowships for the pilot units will be searchable all in one place. Over the next several years, the remaining MSU units will add scholarship and fellowship data into the system resulting in all the university’s scholarship and fellowship data being stored in one place. This will make it easier to search across our entire institution, maintain information in one place for all of MSU, and collect more holistic metrics.
How will the MSU Scholarships tool change how my department administers scholarships or fellowships?
MSU Scholarships will help eliminate spreadsheet integration in order to increase productivity, time, accuracy of information, and visibility of processes and workflow throughout each department. With this increased productivity, we can better serve our students and donors by awarding more money and following donor agreements.
What is the timeline for MSU Scholarships?
MSU Scholarships, using the AcademicWorks platform, launched in November 2017 starting with the 10 pilot units. These units include the College of Business (partial), College of Music, College of Natural Science (partial), College of Veterinary Medicine, Graduate School, Honors College, Office of Admissions, Office of Financial Aid, Office of Treasury and Financial Management, and University Advancement.
MSU will initiate a phased approach across campus over the next several years that will include all units that manage and award donor funds. For project updates, visit bolderit.msu.edu/projects/students.
How can my department be part of the next phase to use the tool?
The project team created a list of units who are interested in being part of MSU Scholarships next following the pilot. The project team will reach out to every unit to establish a timeline of when and how they will be on-boarded within MSU Scholarships.