Within the past week, SLA has become aware that several schools have been contacted by Chase student loan reps., who asked the schools to remove Chase from their FFEL lender lists. At this point, SLA is not aware of the number of schools that have been contacted in this recent wave. Earlier this year, Chase as well and several other large lenders made it clear that they would be cutting back on the number of schools that they would lend to. A Chase spokesperson recently noted this change in policy in a Daily News article, "We stopped doing student loans at some community colleges and some four-year colleges, but we are not disclosing the numbers."
These recent moves by Chase are notable for several reasons:
- Several of the schools recently contacted by Chase had significant FFEL loan volumes and were four- year institutions, suggesting that the demographics of the schools contacted during this wave are different from the first.
- With this being peak lending season, most financial aid administrators assumed that these lender changes were behind them, especially with the Department of Education's liquidity plan just weeks away from being implemented.
As the 4th largest FFEL loan originator in FY 2007, JP Morgan Chase originated $3.1 billion in FFEL loans, according to Department of Education figures.
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