A College's Own Numbers Failed Three Separate Federal Checks

Southern New Hampshire University⧉ enrolled 223,520 students and disbursed $816.4 million in federal Title IV aid -- grants, loans, and work-study -- to about 113,000 students⧉ in the 2021-2022 academic year.▸ That same year, the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, ED's internal watchdog, checked the data SNHU reported to the federal system behind College Scorecard and College Navigator. It didn't hold up in a single one of the three surveys OIG examined⧉.

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is the federal government's annual census of every college receiving Title IV student aid -- 12 surveys covering enrollment, cost, financial aid, and graduation outcomes, collected by the Department's National Center for Education Statistics⧉.▸ The Department republishes it through College Scorecard and College Navigator⧉ -- consumer tools built to help prospective students and parents compare schools before committing years and loans to one. Schools self-report the numbers; federal law requires every Title IV-participating school to report accurate data "to the satisfaction of the Secretary of Education,"⧉ but IPEDS itself performs no independent check. This inspection was OIG doing that check by hand, one sampled student record at a time.

SNHU's Student Financial Aid (SFA) survey reports how much grant and scholarship aid a defined cohort of students received -- the basis for the net price a college publishes.▸ To check it, OIG drew a random sample of 71 students from a population of 1,483⧉ SNHU had counted as first-time, full-time aid recipients for fall 2021. It only needed to review 17 before stopping: 7 of those 17 records were not verifiable⧉ -- students who had already attended another college, a fact their own financial-aid applications showed, that SNHU failed to catch when building the cohort.

Under OIG's sampling design, more than three errors is enough to reject an entire population at 95% confidence, so the other 54 sampled students were never reviewed⧉.▸ As a result, SNHU's published net price of $32,043 for 2021-22 was unreliable⧉, and the school had overstated total grant and scholarship aid by at least $27,098⧉.

Graduation rate is the number most families associate with picking a college, and OIG built its check the same way: a sample of 69 students from a population of 886 who began at SNHU in the 2016-17 academic year⧉, tracked for whether they finished within 150% of normal time.▸ Sixteen of the 69 should never have been in that cohort⧉: 13 had started classes before the official fall 2016 term -- 11 in spring, 2 in summer -- and 4 arrived with transfer credit that should have excluded them as "first-time" students.

SNHU's IPEDS keyholder, the staff member every reporting school designates as responsible for its survey accuracy, told auditors she had been trained years earlier to leave a graduation-rate cohort unchanged once created -- even though current IPEDS guidance allows corrections⧉.▸ The result: SNHU's overall graduation rate for 2021-22 was not reliable⧉.

The third finding is simpler, and in its way more revealing.▸ SNHU's cost-of-attendance budget for a nine-month period grew from $20,400 to $21,540 between 2020-21 and 2021-22⧉ -- the school used the right total. But it split that new total using the old year's percentages⧉: 52% to room and board instead of the correct 54%, 48% to other expenses instead of 46%. Every downstream figure came out wrong, in different directions, from that one substitution -- room and board under-reported, on-campus other expenses under-reported, off-campus other expenses over-reported⧉. SNHU also could not produce documentation for its books-and-supplies figure or for the $21,540 total itself⧉ when auditors asked for it.

OIG made five recommendations⧉, all directed to the Chief Operating Officer for Federal Student Aid working with NCES's Commissioner.▸ SNHU agreed to three and says it has already revised its policies, added staff training, and built a quality-control review to catch these errors going forward. It disagreed with the other two, which ask FSA to consider fine or sanction action under Title IV's Subpart G rules⧉ over the SFA- and graduation-rate inaccuracies -- SNHU argues the errors were immaterial and no student was harmed. OIG's written response: SNHU never supplied verifiable data for its full student population to back that claim, only recalculations for the sample it disputed. What happens next is FSA's call, not OIG's or SNHU's⧉ -- the report closes without a date attached to that decision.