Student Loan Borrower Assistance Guide

If you’re facing challenges with a student lender or loan servicer, exploring and connecting with student loan support programs might provide the assistance you need.

For example, there is the National Consumer Law Center or the NCLC, which operates a nationwide student loan borrower assistance program. Here’s how the group describes its mission on the website:

“NCLC’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project helps student loan borrowers understand their student loan rights and obligations. We work with student loan lawyers and advocates nationwide and collect student loan borrower stories to share with lawmakers. We fight to make the student loan system better for borrowers.”

Why is this important?

For a number of reasons, starting with the realities that confront most student loan borrowers. They are workers who invest in their higher education to be able to make a better wage, or earn a better income. They’re not specialists in lending, and they don’t have time to sit around all day learning about loans. So they are at a disadvantage if they end up in an adversarial relationship with a lender, a company that specializes in student loans, and knows all of the loopholes and the tricks of the trade. The lender also has extensive resources at its disposal, and sometimes that leads the lender to feel like they really have carte blanche to do, well, whatever they want. Despite that feeling, though, lenders are accountable to borrowers!

Starting with the Basics

If you look at what the NCLC actually does, one of its main goals is to educate borrowers, to help them be able to talk intelligently about their loans.

You see the following questions showcased on their website:

What type of loan do you have, a federal loan or a private loan? – this is going to be critically important, because federal loans come with certain protections that private loans don’t have.

What is your loan status, and what has it been in the past? – here, advocates will educate about forbearance, deferment, loan cancellation, and loan modification, and help borrowers understand what’s possible with their student loan accounts.

Who is your loan servicer? – if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you know that a major source of confusion for borrowers is when lenders and services sell student loan debt to each other – and they do it all the time, without any warning. All of a sudden, the borrower is reporting to a brand-new company, and that’s not a good way to build trust or really get accounts resolved. In fact, it often adds to the confusion if the lender or loan servicer is not following their own responsibility to keep accounts straight.

So starting with all these things, the NCLC tries to ensure that borrowers know what position they’re in when they start negotiations.

Additional Student Loan Borrower Assistance Programs

Another major thing you can read on the NCLC website is that they want borrowers to know that even though the biggest Biden program for student loan debt cancellation has failed, there are still alternative programs available to millions of borrowers.

They highlight these and other borrower assistance programs on the site:

1. PSLF – the PSLF program helps millions of borrowers who were able to get jobs in public administration or a related work sector.
2. Total and permanent disability – disability status can result in student loan debt cancellation, and this is an important thing to note if you’re not eligible for some other program.
3. Income-driven repayment plans – this is a big one: it involves the ability of borrowers to get an income-driven plan that sets a maximum cap on the amounts they will have to pay monthly or annually. Income-driven plans often reduce the loan payment amount quite considerably and protect borrowers from having to spend large amounts of their household budget on their student loans.
4. Bad programs and bad certifications – there are also all sorts of contingencies where you can get loans settled and resolved based on inappropriate action by the school or entity that you attended. Accreditation problems can also help with the borrower’s complaint, in some cases.

Share Your Story!

The NCLC also offers a place for borrowers to share their stories on the website. The goal, as planners write, is to get all these stories together and start to highlight the extent of the student loan problem, informing borrowers about what others are facing to help them deal with their own problems with lenders.

We’re doing quite a lot of that here, too – interviewing people and putting together stories, and bringing you the resources you need to stand by your rights under the law. When lenders try to take advantage of you, you can often show them the facts, and demand that they negotiate with you in good faith. Keep an eye out here for more!