There are a variety of reasons why your financial aid my not have paid to your account yet. Students must take action to accept their financial aid before it will pay AND they must meet certain eligibility requirements. Please read on to troubleshoot why your financial aid may not be paying to your billing account.
Filling out the FAFSA is the very first step to get started in the financial aid process and this must be completed each school year. If you do not have an award offer yet, please double check that you have filled out the FAFSA at StudentAid.gov. Please also double check that you have SDSU listed on the FAFSA. You can do this by logging back into the FAFSA and selecting the option to make a FAFSA correction or to add a school code. Once you have SDSU added, click through to the end of the application and re-sign and submit the FAFSA. It can take up to two weeks for this change to come through to our office.
Occasionally, the federal government may request that we gather more information before we can create an award offer. If you need to provide us with more information, you should receive an email. However, you can always check on any requirements you might have on your Financial Aid Self Service. Please contact our office for any questions on these items and to help you get them taken care of.
You can access your financial aid offer on our student portal. To access the portal, log into MyState and click on the Dashboard tab then locate the Financial Aid Self Service item on your Dashboard.
Before aid can pay to your student billing account, students must accept their financial aid offer. If you go through this step and do not have any aid to accept, this probably means that you have not been awarded yet.
You can access your financial aid offer on our student portal. To access the portal, log into MyState and click on the Dashboard tab then locate the Financial Aid Self Service item on your Dashboard. Follow the instructions to access Financial Aid Self Service. If you have not previously logged into your MyState account, please go to mystate.sdstate.edu. In the upper right-hand corner click the "Sign In" button and follow the directions under "MyState First Time Login" on the right.
To accept or decline your financial aid offer once you are logged into your Financial Aid Self Service:
- View the upper right side of the page and ensure you see South Dakota State and the 2024-2025 Award Year
- Select View Questions in the red box under “Responses Required” and answer the questions (you can omit this step if you previously answered these questions).
- Select the Award Offer tab
- Use the Take Action dropdown box to accept and decline individual awards
- Select Submit at the bottom of the page
If you accept federal loan funding you will need to complete the following two items before you can receive your loans:
Students must complete a Master Promissory Note and Entrance Loan Counseling as first time borrowers. These two items can be completed at StudentAid.gov. You will need to log into this website with your FSA ID. This is the same log in you used for your FAFSA.
In general, students will only need to fill out each of these one time. However, there may be a few reasons that a student might need to complete a Master Promissory Note again.
How to complete your MPN
How to complete your Entrance Counseling
If you have a SDSU scholarship, you will need to navigate to your Financial Aid Self Service and check for that requirement. Please use the requirement link to submit your thank you note.
Students must complete attendance confirmation found in your MyState Dashboard before your federal financial aid will pay to your billing account. This helps us to ensure you are planning to attend during the semester that we are paying your federal aid in.
In order to be eligible for federal loans, you must be enrolled in 6 undergraduate credits as an undergrad or 5 graduate credits as a graduate student. If your credits are a combination of graduate and undergraduate credits, you still need to make sure you are hitting these requirements OR you may be able to have your advisor send the financial aid office an email stating that these credits are counting towards your program.
Additionally, for financial aid purposes you may only re-take a course after passing it one time for it to count towards your financial aid enrollment. Because of this, some courses that have the same course number each semester but have different course topics, could show up as repeats. Please contact our office if you think this is the case for you.
In order to be eligible to receive federal aid, you must be meeting the minimum satisfactory academic standards:
GPA:
- Undergraduate students must maintain a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 2.0 or above.
- Graduate students must maintain a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 or above.
Pace:
All students must successfully complete a minimum 67% of cumulative credits attempted. Pace is calculated by dividing the total number of cumulative credits completed by the total number of cumulative credits attempted.
Maximum credits attempted to complete degree program:
All students must complete their degree program with credits attempted that are no greater than 150% of the number of credits required to earn the degree. The maximum attempted units is calculated by multiplying the minimum units required for the academic program by 150%. For example, most undergraduate degrees require a minimum of 120 credits, so that student can attempt a maximum of 180 credit hours before being suspended from financial aid (120 x 150% = 180). A graduate program that requires 48 credits would allow for a maximum of 72 credits before the student would be suspended from financial aid (48 x 150% = 72).