Winter Session Financial Aid

For financial aid purposes, the Winter Term will be considered part of the Spring Semester as described in the Federal Student Aid Handbook.

screenshot of a page from the Federal Student Aid Handbook highlighting the paragraph referring to winter term aid. The text of that paragraph is provided in the image caption. — In certain limited cases for academic programs o ered in standard terms, a short nonstandard term may be treated as part of one of the standard terms, and the combined terms may be considered to be a single standard term. For example, a program is o ered in a calendar consisting of two 15-week semesters and a 4-week intersession. To consider the program as consisting only of semesters, the intersession may be treated as part of one of the two semesters as long as the same treatment is applied for all FSA purposes to all students enrolled in the program. In addition, hours taken in the intersession must count towards a student's enrollment status for the combined term and costs for the intersession must be appropriately included in the cost of attendance.

Thus, enrollment status (FT/TT/HT/<HT) will be based on the total of the number of credits for which the student enrolled in the January and Spring terms, inclusive. Spring Cost of Attendance budgets for financial aid applicants who enroll in both January and Spring and are financial aid applicants will be manually adjusted to reflect the costs for the additional number of weeks and the credits taken in the January term. (These costs will appear as Spring costs in the current MaineStreet configuration.)

Given the requirements of the current MaineStreet configuration, Spring aid (including for those students enrolled in January term) will be disbursed according to the 10 days before the first day rule for the dates of the Spring Semester and refunds will be created using the Spring semester procedures. Allowances will be made for students enrolled in the January term who have registered for Spring and are anticipating financial aid for Spring in terms of expectation of on-time payment and imposition of late fees such that the student will not be harmed. Consideration will be given to students who need assistance in buying books and supplies for January term, such as the use of bookstore credits.