Student Loan fee payments

Loan Entitlement Advice (LEA)

If, upon successful completion of the VoS process, the student is determined as eligible for any part of the Student Loan Scheme StudyLink will issue an LEA letter to the student.

This informs them of their entitlements under the Student Loan Scheme.

Payments can then be made to the student for any living costs and/or course-related costs (CRC), and to the provider for the approved total compulsory fees.

Payments to education providers

Fees payments to education providers are made on the 10^th day after the LEA letter is issued. This is the disclosure period.

This is to allow the student three clear days in which to receive the Loan Entitlement Advice and cancel the contract, in terms of the disclosure requirements of the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003.

Payments for compulsory fees are made on behalf of the student by direct transfer to the bank account number provided by the provider.

Individual fee payments, to a provider, are grouped together for any given date and a single bulk payment is made to the nominated provider bank account. Payments are made according to standard banking practice and credited overnight to the provider’s bank account.

The 10-day waiting period, for students to cancel their loan must have expired before any payment can be made to a provider. This cannot be over-ridden (i.e. StudyLink cannot speed up this process to pay fees any faster).

Amount of fee payment

StudyLink may not necessarily pay all of the fees that are requested by the education provider. This could be for a number of reasons, including:

• the student has received Training Incentive Allowance payments towards fees for the same course. This means that the Student Loan fees payments is reduced by the TIA amount
• some fees have been paid previously, so the requested fees amount has been reduced by the amount that has already been paid.

Refund of unused fees

Any unused fees that were paid by Student Loan must be refunded back to StudyLink. This can include cases where the student has withdrawn or has dropped papers (and is entitled to a refund), or cases where the fees were overpaid for some other reason.

Any unused fees cannot be carried over to another period of study. The fees are paid for that particular period and programme – if they are not required, they need to be refunded. They should not be used to pay the fees for the course that the student is studying next year for example.

Superseding fee requests

If StudyLink receives a fees request, for the same student at the same provider, subsequent to a fees request not yet paid, the new fees request will supersede the original fees request. For example:

On 9 January 2013 a VoS Response is received detailing:

• Fees Request 700
• Total Fees 700

This is applied to the student’s record but has yet to be paid to the provider as payment is not due until 14 days prior to the course start date.

On 21 January 2013 another VoS response is received, as the student has picked up additional papers, detailing:

• Fees Request 900
• Total Fees 900

This is applied to the student’s record and supersedes the original fees request, as it has yet to be paid. StudyLink would then pay $900 once it is 14 days prior to course start date.