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Default Prevention

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Debt Management

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Training

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Loan Delivery

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Customer Service

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Scholarships

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Early Awareness

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Resources

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Student Success

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Experience

The USA Funds Advantage

USA Funds® offers you and your students advantages that other guarantors simply don't provide. By using the USA Funds guarantee, you can expect:

  • The most up-to-date tools to manage the loan process.
  • The opportunity to benefit from a single point of service throughout the life of every loan.
  • A focus on outstanding customer service.

You also benefit from:

  • The most-comprehensive array of debt-management and default-prevention services available in the Federal Family Education Loan Program.
  • Renowned training programs for you and your staff.
  • A commitment to helping families prepare for, gain access to and successfully complete higher education.

We invite you to consider the following advantages that USA Funds offers you.

Default Prevention | Debt Management | Training | 
Loan Delivery | Customer Service | Scholarships | 
Early Awareness | Resources | Student Success | Experience

Proven Default-Prevention Performance

  • Investment in Default Prevention — USA Funds invests in a team of more than 200 full-time professionals, backed by the latest technology and a sophisticated predictive model, to counsel borrowers who are experiencing payment problems about their options for avoiding default.
  • Restoring Loans to Repayment — During the past fiscal year, USA Funds' default-aversion activities resolved nearly 1.2 million seriously past-due student-loan accounts, preventing nearly $15.8 billion in loan defaults. USA Funds successfully prevented default on more than 94 percent of these accounts.
  • Low Cohort-Default Rate — USA Funds achieved a reduction of more than 62 percent in its cohort-default rate during the 10 most-recent cohort periods for which final rates are available.

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Comprehensive Debt-Management Support

  • USA Funds Life Skills® — This flexible program equips you to educate your students about time- and money-management issues while they are on campus and following graduation. USA Funds Life Skills now also features materials that address the special needs of graduate and professional students and other adult learners. No other guarantor offers a program like USA Funds Life Skills.
  • Debt-Management Consultants — Our experienced debt-management consultants will review and assess your debt-management activities and suggest improvements at no cost to you. Our consultants also can help you develop a default-management plan and identify other action items to strengthen your campus' default-prevention efforts.
  • USA Funds Debt Manager ® — This Web-based service permits you to quickly and easily tailor letter, e-mail  or phone campaigns to your borrowers to ensure they stay on the path toward successful loan repayment.
  • Online Best Practices Manual — USA Funds offers a free resource online — Best Practices Manual— that is full of ideas, tools and activities for enhancing your campus debt-management activities.
  • USA Funds Loan CounselorSM — USA Funds Stafford Loan GuideSM entrance counseling and USA Funds Student Loan Transition GuideSM exit counseling offer memorable guidance to help your borrowers take control of their student loans.
  • Online Student-Loan Counseling — USA Funds supports the leading online entrance- and exit-counseling services, with special options for annual MPN counseling, graduate exit counseling and Perkins loan counseling. 
  • Web Resources for Borrowers with Loan-Payment Problems — Borrowers whose payments are 60 days or more past due can access their account information online, learn about the solutions for resolving their payment problems and take action to avoid additional costs.
  • School Reports — We offer you reports that can help you track borrowers with payment problems to combat loan defaults.
  • Borrower Debt Management Information Service — Using this service, you can arrange for correspondence to be sent to your borrowers to advise them of their repayment options.

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Renowned Training Programs

  • Financial-Aid Workshops — To help you comply with the ever-changing rules governing the delivery of student aid, USA Funds presents a twice-yearly series of Financial-Aid Workshops at sites conveniently located throughout the United States.
  • Webcasts — If you are unable to attend one of our workshops, USA Funds schedules webcasts that cover many of the same topics.
  • Online Training — USA Funds offers a growing curriculum of online courses to help new financial-aid administrators understand important aspects of their jobs and help experienced financial-aid professionals sharpen their skills to better serve their students and their institutions.
  • Student-Loan Exit-Counseling Sessions — Experienced financial-aid consultants are available to present group student-loan exit-counseling sessions at your school.
  • Speaker's Bureau — USA Funds offers experts to speak on a variety of financial-aid issues at your meetings or conferences.

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Innovative Loan-Delivery Products

  • Investment in Research and Development — USA Funds has made a commitment to invest an average of $25 million annually in the research and development of new and enhanced education-loan services. No other guarantor has made a commitment of this scope.
  • Innovative Loan-Delivery Services — As the organization that developed the first electronic student-loan application process, USA Funds continues to support the leading loan-delivery innovations, such as OpenNet and electronic signatures. USA Funds also is a participant in ELM, the National Student Clearinghouse and Meteor.

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Attentive Customer Service

  • Quick and Accurate Answers — Through USA Funds' contract with the premier guarantor servicer, Sallie Mae, we support more than 1,000 representatives who are ready to respond quickly and accurately to you and your borrowers, including those with special needs, such as Spanish-speaking and hearing-impaired customers.
  • Single Point of Service Option — By using the USA Funds guarantee and selecting lenders that work with Sallie Mae, you can offer your borrowers the convenience of working with a single organization from loan origination through repayment.
  • Long-Term, Personal Relationship — Our customers tell us that they've worked with USA Funds on average for nine years. Your USA Funds Services representative is your personal connection to the finest education-loan services available in the FFELP.
  • Answers to Your Policy Questions — If you have a question about FFELP loan policies, send an e-mail to askpolicy@usafunds.org. Our policy experts will answer your question, generally within 48 hours.

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Scholarships for Your Students

  • USA Funds Scholarships — Through USA Funds Access to Education Scholarships® , USA Funds awarded $8.3 million in need-based scholarships to more than 5,600 deserving students nationwide for the 2007-2008 academic year. USA Funds awarded an additional $315,000 in scholarships to 210 graduating high-school seniors in communities where USA Funds has offices and states where USA Funds is the designated guarantor of federal student loans.
  • Support for Scholarships — USA Funds provided $300,000 in grants to support the national scholarship programs of organizations that primarily assist minority students.

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Early Awareness of Higher-Education Benefits

  • USA Funds Unlock the Future® — USA Funds Unlock the Future program is available at no cost to postsecondary institutions, community agencies and faith-based organizations. The multimedia program encourages middle-school students and their parents — particularly those from disadvantaged families — to plan and pursue postsecondary studies.
  • USA Funds Consejos — USA Funds Consejos provides Latino students and their families more-complete information about the value of a postsecondary education, the education options available to them and the availability of financial aid. This flexible program allows presenters to customize the presentation to the particular audience — including middle-school students, parents or the entire family — that they are trying to reach.
  • College Access Initiative Web site — In cooperation with College Answer, the leading going-to-college Web site, USA Funds offers step-by-step tutorials on planning and paying for college, scholarship information, and state-specific college-planning resources.

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Print and Online Resources

  • Free Publications — USA Funds offers a library of free publications to help families plan and pay for higher education.
  • Online Resources — USA Funds'  Web site supplies a wealth of resources for you and your borrowers.
  • Weekly Online Newsletter — USA Funds Education Access Report delivers the latest information about student-aid legislation and regulations, new products and services, and debt-management practices.

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Promoting Student Success

  • Best Practices in Student Retention — USA Funds offers you assistance, including an online resource to help your institution bolster its persistence and graduation rates.

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Unmatched Experience

  • Forty-Five Years of Student-Loan Experience — USA Funds guaranteed its first student loan in 1961. Since then, the USA Funds guarantee has supported more than $154 billion in financial aid to more than 16.5 million students and parents, as well as service to thousands of educational and financial institutions.

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To learn how you can put the USA Funds advantage to work for you, contact your USA Funds Services representative.