Your thoughts on private student loans

The Consumer Bureau has been busy when it comes to student loans. We worked with the Department of Education to launch our Know Before You Owe: Student Loans project and we rolled out the Student Debt Repayment Assistant to help student loan borrowers understand their repayment options. We also published a notice in the Federal Register to ask you – students, lenders, servicers, schools, and other members of the public – to tell us about your experiences with the private student loan market. The response we’ve already received from all corners has been impressive and very helpful.

We have received strong cooperation from the Consumer Bankers Association, trade associations representing non-profit lenders, and the largest for-profit lenders in the private student loan market, who are providing a great deal of data to help us learn more about the marketplace. We’re also working with the Department of Education to crunch numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics .

In response to our notice, we also received over 2,000 comments from consumer advocates, industry associations, banks, schools, and individual borrowers. Click here to read some of the comments we received from advocacy groups, institutions, and other trade associations.

Many of the comments we received from individual borrowers told of deeply personal experiences with private student loans. The CFPB takes privacy very seriously, so we are taking extra care with these sensitive comments and redacting certain personally identifiable information. We will post the remaining comments in the coming weeks.

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We’re working hard to identify the big issues and to determine how to make the market work better for students and the industry. We will continue to give you updates about what we’re learning from your comments, the information from lenders, and other data sources as we make progress.