Falling Back into Another Year Can you believe it? The students are back on campus, temperatures seem to be cooling down, and pumpkin spice everything is creeping back into our lives. That’s right—fall is officially here, and with it comes the start…
NeSIS eNews - September 2025
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Falling Back into Another Year
Can you believe it? The students are back on campus, temperatures seem to be cooling down, and pumpkin spice everything is creeping back into our lives. That’s right—fall is officially here, and with it comes the start of a new school year and a fresh wave of energy.
This season always feels like a reset - it’s a time to refocus, reenergize, and maybe even reorganize that desk (no judgment if it’s still rocking summer chaos). Even though summer is usually a somewhat slower time, there was still a lot going on and a lot was accomplished, so your dedication hasn’t gone unnoticed. The way you’ve handled the challenges that arose and kept things moving—especially during busy transitions—is seriously impressive.
So as the leaves start to turn and the days get a little crisper, let’s keep that momentum going. Keep showing up, supporting each other, and bringing your best to everything you do. We’ve got exciting things ahead, and every bit of effort you put in helps us get there.
Thanks for all you do. Let’s make this year one to remember!
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NeSIS Award Winner
The latest NeSIS award is Shareen Thewke for her outstanding work and going above and beyond in a number of efforts recently. Firstly, she built a query that calculates totals to validate the FA PRP fix and also trained Tracy Grauer and a new person in the Student Financials office at UNL on the Comm Gen tool - as you may know, comm gen is complex. These are just a few examples of how Shareen identifies a need and steps up to solve it by thinking outside the box. She is a super star that continually provides an advanced level of service – thank you Shareen and congratulations!
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Andrea Childress
AVP IT & CIO
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Dealing with Fake Admissions Applications
Fake admissions applications are a very hot topic! The Admissions teams on all campuses have been dealing with fake applications for quite some time, and it is a significant and growing topic of concern, consuming valuable time and money. It is a struggle to manually review, investigate and clean up the influx of fraudulent applications with the goal being to catch them early to prevent them from getting far into the college process for a multitude of reasons. Then, there is the time that is required from staff to get the cleanup steps completed in a timely manner to avoid as many trickle down effects in other offices across the campus trying to prevent a ghost student from slipping through. The idea is to identify and wipe out data so that the NUID assigned to the fake applicant does not continue to receive access or services and hopefully avoid security vulnerabilities, fraudulent claiming of financial aid money, and taking spots and resources away from real students. The reality is that these ghost students may not be identified as fake until they don’t show up for advising appointments or school.
The admissions team has discussed fake applications, and have determined the following processing steps to take to make sure people know that the assigned NUID should not be considered a valid ID when looking at an account in PeopleSoft or SailPoint.
* XXXDUP- the last name
* Wipe SSN
* Change email address to bad.application(a)campus.edu<mailto:bad.application@campus.edu>
* Delete application via delete application process
* Remove security roles: The NeSIS team developed a way to automatically remove the roles from applicants deemed as fake and identified with XXXDUP- using the Dynamic Applicant Role Query. This process runs four times per day.
Queries have been created to identify fake applications that have remaining steps to complete in the fake applicant clean-up process. The queries will be shared with the campuses and added to the clean-up reports for quarterly review to ensure proper handling for all parties.
NeSIS is also researching the possibility of using AI to identify some fake apps and potentially stop them before the application completes processing. A group including members from each campus admissions office will be discussing the common things to look for when trying to identify a fake applicant and determine a set of rules that could be incorporated into identifying as many of them as we can to prevent the application from completing.
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Dixie Teten
Functional Coordinator, Admissions
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NU External Organization 2-year/4-year Designation Clean Up
The NU schools are working on cleaning up external organizations in PeopleSoft that are either missing the 2-year/4-year School Type designation or have a designation that does not match UNL's current degree audit system (Uachieve). It is important that these match to ensure that students have the correct 2-year transfer credit limitation applied to their records for degree audit purposes.
More than 5000 external organizations were pulled for review based on settings in Uachieve and the student information system to see if their School Type matched.
The comparison was broken down into 4 groups listed below along with the number of external orgs that fell into each group:
* 4-year (UNL) vs. 2-year (PS) - 38 (in the process of being corrected)
* 2-year (UNL) vs. 4-year (PS) - 67
* 4-year (UNL) vs. Other (PS) - 151
* 2-year (UNL) vs. Other (PS) - 707
The NU external education group is in the process of making the appropriate changes so the two systems are in alignment. A query is available (NBACC_EXT_ORG_WITH_TR_CR) that will help ensure all students have the proper amount of transfer credits for the external organizations that are updated.
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Jean Padrnos
Lead Functional Coordinator
Getting Creative with Delivered Tools: Meeting Federal Regulations without Extra Costs
Sometimes the best solutions are the ones already in your toolbox. Over the past month, our team faced two new federal requirements in financial aid reporting. Instead of turning to custom development, we found a way to meet these regulations by leaning into the delivered PeopleSoft tools we already have. The result? Compliance achieved, money saved, and no added strain on our development team.
Project #1: V4 and V5 Identity Verification Reporting
The Department of Education recently rolled out new requirements for reporting V4 and V5 identity verification results through the FAFSA Partner Portal (FPP). This could be done by manually going to the FPP site and entering each student in manually. However, by building a simple process using Common Attribute Framework (CAF) fields and queries, we were able to generate the required CSV file for submission. Staff can now record verification results directly in PeopleSoft in the CAF fields, run a query, and produce a file ready for upload to FPP. No customization. No outside vendor. Just delivered functionality doing the job it was meant to do.
Project #2: FISAP Total Income Fix
Around the same time, Oracle identified an issue with missing “Total Income” values in certain ISIR records. This had implications for the FISAP (Fiscal Operations Report and Application to Participate), which relies on those numbers. To help staff complete the FISAP accurately, I created a set of queries that calculate Total Income using the Department of Education’s official formulas. These queries allow users to quickly verify and correct values, ensuring reporting accuracy without headaches (or expensive add-ons).
Why This Matters
Both of these projects underscore a simple truth: sometimes the tools we need are already at our fingertips. By leveraging delivered PeopleSoft functionality, we avoided new development work, saved money on external products, and provided our staff with practical, easy-to-use solutions.
Compliance doesn’t always have to mean complexity. With a little creativity and some query know-how, we can meet federal requirements, save resources, and keep our systems running smoothly. And that’s a win for everyone!
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Shareen Thewke
Functional Coordinator, Financial Aid
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2025 Accessibility Review Project Update
Substantial progress is being made in the accessibility review project. Weekly reports are being run out of the TST environments for the campus portal admins which lay out violations found in the campus dashboards and eforms and provide the developers with resources to address each individual item listed. We have held three joint issue resolution working sessions this month where NeSIS and the NU/SC portal admins have met collectively to work on campus items. These sessions provide a collaboration space where people can ask questions and share knowledge for locating and updating code.
We hope to address as many overarching issues as possible before the PUM maintenance testing begins next month. Once the PUM is applied in TST, we plan to clear out the accessibility tables and start over with a fresh clean set of reports.
The next Accessibility Review Meeting will take place at the end of the Enterprise Tools meeting on Thursday, 9/11 at 9am.
For more information, refer to the NeSIS WCAG 2.1 AA Accessibility page<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uofnebraska.sharepoint.com/sites/Enterp… > in SharePoint.
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Susan Lee
Functional Coordinator, Enterprise Tools
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Updates on the Stellic Degree Audit System Implementation Project
The project to implement Stellic, the new degree audit system, is still in full swing for the NU and SC schools. Each school provided an update on where they are and what their next steps are.
UNK - Lisa Neal, University Registrar
* UNK plans to implement transfer credit and registration in the next catalog year.
* We will be doing progress reviews in Spring 2026.
* We received grant funding to purchase the full Care packaging allowing us to import information from Canvas and schedule advising appointments. We intent to implement it as soon as we can, and the timeline will depend on whether we need a contract addendum or if we can begin immediately. I'm waiting to hear from the Stellic sales team. We will also be hiring a grant-funded position for onboarding and training in Stellic.
* UNK will transition to a project success manager for the audit over the next month. For now, Jon will handle transfer implementation and Joshua will handle registration implementation.
UNL - Steve Booton, University Registrar
* UNL is live with degree audits for four (4) of their ten (10) colleges.
* Two (2) more colleges will go live shortly with another undergraduate college to go live later this fall.
* The remaining three (3) undergraduate colleges will go live in late fall and during the spring semester.
* We are currently working on academic pathways and discussing with our campus community how we hope to use the pathways for both current students as well as prospective students.
* Transfer credit and registration are planned for implementation during this catalog year.
* Finally, I just met with college and academic leadership. They are cheering on the project and excited for us to keep going!
UNO - Matt Schill, University Registrar
* UNO launched Stellic to over 4,000 students (Fall 2024 catalog and forward)
* More than 3,600 degree audits built and 500+ Academic Pathways created in past and future catalogs.
* Stellic will be available to all degree-seeking Undergraduate and Graduate students in Spring 2026.
CSC - Melissa Mitchell, College Registrar
* CSC went live with Stellic Graduate student degree audits on Tuesday, September 2 for our faculty and staff. Students will have access beginning Monday, September 8.
* We have communicated this new platform to our students, staff and faculty and everyone seems to be excited.
* We have training with Stellic on Friday, September 5 that should be very informative for all our graduate faculty advisors that will cover degree audits, substitutions and planner.
* This is phase one of the Stellic implementation with more enhancements to be rolled out in the future.
PSC - Heather Rinne, College Registrar
* Stellic audits are live for advisors and academic staff.
* Students will go olive by the end of September. The student population includes anyone with admitted terms of 1248 and newer in all careers and programs.
* PSC has also begun working on the Pathways and plans to have those ready before advising begins in January. We're hoping to have at least some of them available when we go live to the students.
WSC - Rebeka Wilson, College Registrar
* WSC plans to go live with the BST - Business/Technology school in January with all other schools in the Fall of 2026.
Upcoming Events
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Tuesday, September 9
9am - SC Financial Aid Team Meeting
10:30am - SR Team Meeting
1:30pm - Integration Team Meeting
Wednesday, September 10
10:30 - NU Student Financials Team Meeting
Thursday, September 11
9am - Enterprise Tools/Dashboard Team Meeting
Tuesday, September 16
9am - Financial Aid Team Meeting
Wednesday, September 17
9am - Admissions Team Meeting
Thursday, September 18
9am - WebFOCUS Campus Admins
Wednesday, October 1
10:30am - Student Financials Team Meeting
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