Do all of these lenders offer competitive rates? Or is a students hand really forced to accept exploitive terms?
No. They’re very competitive and getting more so. With competition comes lowering in fee structure and interest rates. So what I try to do is a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet, choosing maybe eight of the most popular lenders. From there, it’s up to the student to select who they want to borrow from. The average Anderson student is about 28 years old. For many, the late twenties to early thirties ushers in marriage and a family. Does your office take a person’s marital status into consideration when determining how much aid to award? Well, first off, we actually have a very few number of married students in our program. I’ve seen it increase a little bit over the past maybe eight or nine years, but it’s usually no more than 2% of our entire student body. Because federal aid does have a lot of restrictions on it, the budgets aren’t any higher unless we have a working spouse with a small child in day care. Other than that, the financial break is not given in the budget but in the allowa
