Can you receive Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for an accredited college of Independent Study/Distance Learning?

I am an adult with a good full-time day job who needs a degree to advance my career. My local colleges do not offer evening classes for the degree I am trying to pursue. Therefore, I am looking into colleges that offer Independent Study and/or Distance Learning. I found quite a few Independent Study/Distance Learning colleges that are accredited and meets the standards required for my advancement. I have received information from these colleges, as well as information on paying for it. Most offers an institutionall financing program (not affordable), or suggest employer tuitionreimbursementt (I don't qualify) or personal loans such as Sallie Mae (I got denied). However, none of them mentioned applying for FAFSA. I decided to try it anyhow and tried to complete a FAFSA on the web, but when I went to search for school codes for several accredited Independent Study/Distance Learning colleges, I kept getting the message "no school codes were found". Can you not receive Federal Financial Aid for this type of education??

Schools that offer only "correspondence-style" Distance Learning Programs are not eligible for participation in the federal student aid system, because they violate the participation standard known as the Correspondence Course limitation.

Schools that offer "telecommunications-style" Distance Learning Programs are eligible for participation.

"A telecommunications course is one that is offered principally through the use of one or more technologies to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between these students and the instructor, whether asynchronously or in 鈥渞eal-time.鈥?br>
"A correspondence course is a home-study course provided by a school under which the school provides instructional materials, including examinations on the materials, to students who are not physically attending classes at the school. When a student completes a portion of the instructional materials, the student takes the examinations that relate to that portion of the materials and returns the examinations to the school for grading."

If a school offers more than 50% of its courses by correspondence, it is not eligible to participate in the federal aid program.

If your school offers telecommunication courses, it may be eligible to participate, but it must also satisfy other participation criteria.

Here's the thing: The criteria that the Department of Education uses to evaluate schools that apply to the program are criteria that are important to the students, themselves. They all relate to the quality of the program, and the success of the program in graduating and placing students in employment. As you can imagine, participation in the aid system is a big plus for any school, so you really have to wonder why a school would intentionally elect not to participate. If a program does not participate, that's a big red flag for you.

You can get federal aid for distance learning programs, but you'll need to continue searching for schools that are accepted participants. That's your guarantee of quality, institutional control and reliability.

Good luck!

If you choose a distance college that operates on some kind of standard semester system you are ok. They have to have set timeframes... like 12 or 15 weeks. If it is open ended then you cannot use financial aid. I too struggled with finding an online college that does take financial aid, but they are out there. Just keep looking