Research updates on private student loans
Last month, we released a report to Congress with the Department of Education on the private student market. This report helped shed light on how the private student loan market works and where there are opportunities for improvement.
When we design a form or develop a regulation, we work to gather continuous feedback. The same goes for our reports. Since releasing the private student loan report, we’ve been talking to researchers, consumer groups, and industry players to share our results and get feedback. Based on this feedback, we developed ways to make better estimates on certain market statistics, particularly in areas where our data set was incomplete.
While there aren’t any changes to the key findings and recommendations, we released an update today to reflect new methodologies our research team used to calculate some statistics in the report: first, the proportion of private student loan borrowers who exhausted their Federal Stafford Loan options; and second, the extent to which schools certified a borrower’s need for a private student loan.
Compared to the original estimates, the update shows that the number of borrowers who exhausted their federal options is lower than our original estimate, and the level of school certification is higher.
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