Privacy Statement

General Information

The South Carolina Tuition Grants Commission (SCTGC) respects your right to privacy. SCTGC practices industry-standard privacy initiatives in its efforts to protect your personal, professional and financial information. We have taken several steps to safeguard the integrity of our communications and computing infrastructure, including but not limited to employee training, authentication, monitoring, and encryption. Security measures are routinely reviewed as part of our risk management protocol.

Please read the following policy to understand how your personal information will be used as you make full use of our online services. “Personal information” means any information by which you can be personally identified. Personal information includes your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, Social Security number and the like. A domain name or Internet Protocol address is not considered personal information.

Applying for the South Carolina Tuition Grant

The application for the South Carolina Tuition Grant is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). South Carolina residents completing the FAFSA agree to release data elements from their application to the South Carolina Tuition Grants Commission. Through a user agreement with the Federal Department of Education, the Commission retrieves FAFSA application data utilizing a secure and direct electronic transmission process.  All FAFSA data elements received by the Commission are considered confidential and are restricted to authorized parties, as defined by the user agreement between the Commission and the Federal Department of Education.  Applicant-specific information may be shared with the eligible participating institution(s) of your choice so that the institution(s) can include the South Carolina Tuition Grant in your financial aid package.  All personal information shared with these institutions is protected via time-limited encryption mechanisms.

Reading or downloading information

You browse our sites anonymously, and personal information is not collected. We may gather and analyze data regarding usage of our website, including domain name (the name of your Internet service provider), the number of hits to our site, pages visited, and time and length of a user’s session. We use this information to evaluate and improve the content, appearance and utility of the site and to track our visitors’ use of the site for internal research or other business purposes.

Sending us an e-mail

If you send us an e-mail containing comments, concerns or suggestions, we will use your e-mail address only to send you a response. Your e-mail address will not be forwarded to any third parties without your permission.  The South Carolina Tuition Grants Commission cannot guarantee the security of e-mail communications; therefore, the South Carolina Tuition Grants Commission requires sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) be redacted from all documentation before sending to the Commission. Transmitting unredacted PII via email is considered to be a direct violation of the Commission’s Information Security policy.

Using links we provide to other sites

SCTGC’s website contains links to other websites. While we make every effort to protect your information on our website, please be aware that we do not control the policies or content of other sites and cannot protect personal information you provide on other sites (including those we may link to). Please do not assume that our privacy policy covers those other sites.

Disclaimer

The Commission reserves the right, at its discretion, to change, modify, add or remove portions of this Privacy Policy at any time. You should check this page periodically for changes. Your continued use of SCTGC’s website following the posting of changes to this Privacy Policy will mean that you accept those changes.