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The CommonLine Network is a process developed by the National Council of Higher Education Program (NCHELP) community of service providers (guaranty agencies, lenders and servicers) and schools to facilitate the electronic processing of FFELP and Alternative Loans. It standardizes electronic loan application formats and sends response files and error messages, thereby simplifying the loan data exchange process for schools. CommonLine allows schools to use just one school-based software system to communicate with all CommonLine participants including organizations with which the school currently has no electronic connection.
ISAC currently supports two versions of the CommonLine Network: CommonLine Release 4 and CommonLine Release 5, which is the most current release.
The Common Record is a new standard within the student financial aid community. The Common Record standardizes data elements, definitions, edits and structure across Pell Grants, FFELP and Federal Direct Loans to be used in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) system. ED plans to phase-in the implementation of Common Record with schools requiring to become full participants for the 2004-05 award year, which means at that time all schools, third party software providers and services must be able to send and receive data in XML-based Common Record formats.
For technical assistance in the transmission of CommonLine files, contact ISAC’s Lender Services at lenderservices@isac.org.
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