Project SOR — Schedule of Reductions calculator

Problem

• The One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed annual Direct Loan limits and forced schools to apply a Schedule of Reductions for less-than-full-time enrollment for 2026-27.
• Every institution was rebuilding the same spreadsheet privately, with no shared reference, no citations, and no way to compare answers.

Constraints

• Parts of 2026-27 depend on rulemaking still in flight, so the tool has to be explicit about what is confirmed versus preliminary.
• It can never look like an award: no COD origination, no NSLDS records, no institutional approval.
• Staff and students need the same engine but opposite levels of detail.

What I shipped

• A staff calculator covering SAY/BBAY academic years, standard and optional terms, child terms, paid history, distribution models, and per-term disbursements.
• A student estimator with a plain-language step-by-step of exactly how the number was produced.
• A public REST API plus an MCP server so other systems and AI agents can run the same engine.
• A published source register, methodology document, and scenario-challenge process so anyone can dispute the math with citations.

Evidence

Parity fixtures

Department-derived scenarios encoded as fixtures with source IDs, including rounding edge cases.

Version discipline

Engine version, policy year, snapshot date, and release marker returned on every API response.

Public contract

OpenAPI 3.1 spec with a CI contract check to keep docs and behaviour aligned.

What I would do next

• Add a full NSLDS aggregate and lifetime-limit model so Grad PLUS and graduate aggregates can be reasoned about safely.
• Shareable estimate URLs so an advisor can send a student their exact scenario.