Industry Insider - Financial Aid Professionals
ASA recently held a Partnership Dialogue Series - a set of focus groups comprised of lenders and schools. The topic was Consolidation Loans.
The purpose of the Series was for ASA to hear what Financial Aid Professionals thought about the recent borrower trend toward Consolidation Loans. We wanted to hear the community's concerns (i.e. Direct to Consumer Marketing) as well as to engage them collectively so we could gather recommendations for making the whole subject less confusing for all.
During the course of these events I was struck by a common theme that I had not really considered before: Schools and lenders are not often in a forum that allows them to have an open dialogue about what's happening in the marketplace, where both are able to put forth their perspectives on a common issue. It was nice to see all sides recognize that they did, in fact, have a common cause: ensuring that borrowers make educated decisions in the process of evaluating whether or not to consolidate their loans.
As the Dialogue progressed, there were a couple of "aha" moments. The "aha" moment for some in the school community was that the Consolidation Loan was in fact a new loan. In the formation of this new loan, all of the careful choices made on the borrowers' behalf (i.e. interest rate reduction during repayment, guarantor debt management services, the servicer, etc.) were all lost.
The "aha" moment for some in the lending community was when they realized that some schools didn't feel they should provide input into a borrower's decision to consolidate, even when asked.
It was a learning experience for all of us and reminded me that there are many points of view on the same subject. Perhaps if every now and again we all took a minute to discuss common issues, we would learn a lot from each other and find out that we are not as far apart as we think.
During the Series, we all agreed that we need to make sure that students and families are properly educated on the subject of Consolidation Loans and that we should start to focus more of our publications on the topic. We also agreed that we as professionals need to educate ourselves more about what exactly is being offered to students so that we can be more helpful when they call for advice.
In my mind, Consolidation Loans are no different than any other federal student loan offered and we need to take the same care in advising here as we did when our students and families were looking for advice about Stafford or PLUS Loans. Let's face it - we were the ones who taught students and families to trust us when making appropriate higher education financing decisions. And it must be a bit disorienting for them not to be able to ask for our advice now.
Posted by Shelley Saunders on March 09, 2007 at 01:05 PM EST
Post a comment
Note that comments will be posted after content review.
* All fields are required.
Close Window
Blog Author
Susan Nathan
Vice President, Lender and School Services
Biography
Susan Nathan is Vice President of Lender and School Services at American Student Assistance (ASA)®. She has held this position since October of 2002. Ms. Nathan joined ASA in February 1987 as supervisor of the external program review unit. She has held roles of increasing responsibility in product development, operations, client management and customer service, and marketing. She has been a member of the design teams for a number of ASA’s signature products, including FASTFUND, ASA’s disbursement product, and ASA Direct, ASA’s web processing tool. She was the manager of the business plan for ASA’s major system conversion in 1998.
She is credited with the development of ASA’s nationally recognized client management team. Ms. Nathan oversees the ASA Advisory Council, and is the staff liaison to the Marketing Planning Committee of ASA’s Board of Directors.
Prior to joining ASA, Ms. Nathan was a Financial Aid Officer for Lesley College. She is a graduate of Brown University and a fellow of the Institute for Educational Leadership. She is a member of state, regional and national financial aid associations and is routinely sought by the financial aid community as a professional development trainer.
Close WindowHow to use RSS:
Subscribe to American Student Assistance’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to get our news and blog entries delivered directly to your desktop!
You need to install an RSS reader
in order to receive these feeds.
If you don’t have one already installed on you computer, here are some of the more popular options to download one for FREE:
For PC only
RssReader (http://www.rssreader.com)
Feed reader (http://www.feedreader.com/)
For Mac only
NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
NewsFire (http://www.newsfirerss.com/)
To view one of the American Student Assistance
feeds in your RSS Reader:
- Right click (control click, if you’re using a Mac) on the
icon next to the topic that interests you. - Select “copy shortcut” or “copy link location” from the menu.
- Paste the URL into your reader.
For example, you may already have an RSS Reader built into an existing homepage such as the popular examples below:
