Ask any financial aid administrator which criteria are most important in selecting lenders for their students and the first two responses you are likely to hear are customer service and borrower benefits. (Note: While it may seem that no lenders are providing benefits today, as noted in an earlier post, there are two lenders still offering benefits beyond the 0.25% interest rate reduction for auto-debit.) In reviewing disclosure statements accompanying preferred lender lists, it is clear that schools use a multitude of other criteria to select lenders. I will plan on updating this post as I come across other examples. Feel free to provide comments below if there are other criteria that you would like to share with the community.
- Boston College indicates that they seek to provide a variety of lenders (state authority, credit unions, national banks) as one of their lender selection criteria.