Sometimes students need to withdraw from school in the middle of the term. This may simply be tied to a decision not to continue or it may be because of circumstances that preclude finishing the semester. Usually the effective date of the withdrawal will be the day of departure, but sometimes it is judged that the official withdrawal date should be pushed back to the beginning of the semester, so that the cost of tuition can be eliminated. This occurs only in unusual circumstances of non-attendance beyond the student’s control (medical, etc.) when UWSP acknowledges that the student should be held harmless from payment of tuition for the term he or she was prevented from completing.

Impact Of Withdrawing From School Upon Financial Aid

1. The UWSP Financial Aid Office is required by law to re-compute your aid eligibility in the event of a withdrawal from school. We have to adjust the need and aid according to any reduced costs involved because of the early departure. The government presumes that you should not be given aid for living expenses tied to the weeks you did not attend nor should you have aid for more than a proportional amount of tuition expenses. Any student withdrawing prior to the 60% point in the term should expect to have to repay financial aid in a percentage roughly equivalent to the percentage of the term not in attendance. After the 60% point, no aid has to be repaid. Therefore, if you depart from school prior to the 60% point, your aid eligibility will be reduced on a pro-rated basis. If the amount of aid already disbursed to you for the semester exceeds the reduced eligibility, it will be necessary for payments to be made to repay the aid accounts. This could be from any refund you might receive from UWSP or from funds that you were given directly for living expenses.

2. The exact financial impact of your withdrawal may not be known until several weeks after your withdrawal because it will be necessary to determine how much refund (if any) is available to help repay your aid. UWSP must wait until all of your charges have been applied to your account before making the final calculations.

3. Normally, refunds from payments made to UWSP are first applied to repay a portion of your loans (including Stafford loans), and then remaining amounts would repay grant assistance. Usually aid recipients do not receive any of the refund themselves; it all goes to repay aid (unless the refund exceeds the aid received).

4. A calculation is also made for a possible repayment expected from funds that were disbursed directly to you, and only if necessary, you will be billed for an additional partial repayment of aid. Stafford loans are excluded from this calculation because the student is already obligated to repay these funds to the lender.

Special Financial Consideration For Backdated Withdrawals

1. In addition to the considerations mentioned above, when the date of the withdrawal is backdated, the student will typically receive a larger refund from UWSP because of the reduced tuition cost that is likely to occur.

2. Aid recipients will find that this larger refund seldom results in any funds being given directly back to them because Federal law requires all of the refund to be applied to repay aid. Only in a rare instance where a refund exceeds the total financial aid received for the term would a balance be returned to the student.

3. The good news is that the refund will be applied first to reduce student educational loans, and only after all loans are repaid does any refund get channeled to repay grants.