CARES Act – Student

Executive Summary

Section 18004(a)(1) of the CARES Act, Publ. L. No. 116-136 (March 27, 2020) authorized the Secretary of Education to allocate formula grant funds in the amount of $2,790,944 to the University of New Orleans to address the financial needs of students due to the disruption of campus operations from coronavirus. Section 18004 (c) of the CARES Act requires the University of New Orleans to use the funds on students to provide emergency financial aid grants to students for expenses related to the disruption of campus operations due to coronavirus including eligible expenses under a students’ cost of attendance such as food, housing, course materials, technology, health care, and child care, etc. The University of New Orleans certified and agreed to promptly make available emergency financial aid grants from the advanced funds directly to students. The University of New Orleans retained its discretion in determining the amount of each individual emergency financial aid grant consistent with all applicable laws including non-discrimination laws and exercised its professional judgment available under the Section 479A of the Higher Education Act of 1965(HEA) to make adjustments on a case-by-case basis to exclude individual emergency financial aid grants from the calculation of a student’s expected family contribution in that the Secretary of Educations did not consider these individual emergency financial aid grants to constitute Federal financial aid under Title IV of the HEA.

University of New Orleans’ Distribution Plan
Full time Pell grant students with a need greater than 2000 received a payment of $500 for Spring 2020. Pell students with the same need between 6 hours and 11 hours received $250. Pell students less than half time (1-5 hours) and those who were not Pell eligible received $100-$250 based on FAFSA need and enrollment hours.

The total amount awarded for our full time Pell students as of today (May 8, 2020) for Spring would be $724,500. The total amount awarded for our 6-11 Pell students was $140,250. The total for our Pell Students auto-award was $864,750. After running the initial posting, UNO financial aid department continued to check eligibility through May 4th, 2020. With application still coming in and being review through May 4th, there were nearly 480 applications for students who did not meet any of the PELL grants eligibility criteria. UNO will spend approximately $250,000 on the non-Pell student based on the number of applications received as of May 4th.

The application is ongoing until May 4. I have almost 480 applicants now, but some are international students who applied before we knew we had to exclude them. We are working to pull those out now. I believe we will likely spend about $250,000 on the non-Pell students based on the number of applications we are getting now.

The residual approximate $1.7M will be distributed to students enrolled for Summer and Fall 2024.