USA Funds Debt Manager Helps Address Growing Student-Loan Debt

Editor’s Note: The following is a feature from the USA Funds^® 2006 annual report. USA Funds Education Access Report is highlighting the students, financial-aid administrators and education-lending professional featured in the annual report to highlight the ways in which USA Funds is a trusted partner in changing times. To access the full report online, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

More than 40 borrowers each week respond to letters from the International Academy of Design and Technology. They thank the school for reminding them of important information about their student-loan rights and responsibilities, and the options available for getting help with their repayments.

“These are former students who are having difficulty making their loan payments and might have defaulted otherwise,” says Paul Steele, default manager for IADT Northern Region.

Steele and his staff communicate regularly with IADT education-loan borrowers in his region, to let the borrowers know that the school is there to help them with their repayment concerns. To assist them with those communications, the staff turns to USA Funds Debt Manager^®.

“I can’t say enough about how much USA Funds Debt Manager has made my life easier,” Steele says. “The letters are there for you and generate themselves. It really works like a charm.”

USA Funds Debt Manager is a Web-based tool that helps schools prevent student-loan defaults by helping schools connect with borrowers during school and after graduation. Enhancements to USA Funds Debt Manager in 2006 help financial-aid administrators with e-mail campaigns, in addition to the letter and telephone contact with which the tool already provided assistance. In the fall IADT Northern Region added e-mail to its methods of contacting borrowers.

The tool also helps schools track borrower and loan information with data that is refreshed weekly. Additionally, USA Funds Debt Manager permits schools to create customized reports — also enhanced in 2006 — to help measure the success of their default-prevention efforts.

Steele says, “All the data is available when I need it. Before USA Funds Debt Manager, checking records required data entry and research done by hand. But this saves many hours, because I just push a button and the data appears.”

A total of 500 schools across the nation are using USA Funds Debt Manager.

A member of the Career Education Corp. family of schools, IADT offers two-year programs that focus on areas such as fashion design, Web design, criminal justice, business and retail. Steele’s Northern Region includes campuses in Pittsburgh, where he is based; Chicago; Detroit; Nashville, Tenn.; and Schaumburg, Ill. The region’s total number of borrowers in each cohort is about 2,500, Steele says, and USA Funds Debt Manager is helping him to track the cohorts’ decreasing default rates.

“My job is to bring my ideas and get to work on the cohort rate for my group of schools,” says Steele, who has been in his current position since June. “That’s why USA Funds Debt Manager comes in handy. With the letter series that we use, keeping up with data without USA Funds Debt Manager would have been just too big of a task to handle.”

USA Funds Debt Manager is one of a variety of tools that USA Funds offers financial-aid professionals and borrowers to help borrowers manage growing education-loan debt and stay out of default.