Although University of Maryland Global Campus assigns each student a distinct ID number (referred to as a student ID or EMPL ID), which is used for most university functions, there are instances for which Social Security Numbers are required.
The university must use SSNs:
- For federal financial aid (The federal requirements for financial aid are defined in detail elsewhere)
- For processing Veterans Administration benefits
- For processing military tuition assistance
- To produce a record of tuition payments for federal income tax purposes
- To process credit balance refunds through the Maryland Treasurer's Office
- To ensure that payments to accounts such as financial aid, credit cards, and tuition assistance are credited to the proper person's account
- To identify individuals, with some measure of certainty, so as to differentiate records of students with common last names and to avoid the creation of duplicate records
- To provide enrollment records to the National Student Loan Clearinghouse so that UMGC students with federal student loans borrowed at other universities can obtain "in-school deferments while enrolled at UMGC"
- For processing University of Maryland tuition remission forms
- To retain prospective student transcripts when an alternative student identification number does not exist